My First Project in Illustrator

[su_liam]

Sometimes they have to shut down the smeller... xxx smelter when an inversion rolls in.

[su_liam]

Experimenting around with some hand-drawn elements and climate. Nothing I really like yet, but...

[dirt]

So far I like the map in post #20 the best and the town name of Haggisfart.

[su_liam]

Well. Ya gotta love Haggisfart! Anyway...

I haven't been too active of late, what with the heartbreak of jobhunting and all. I'd rather have psoriasis...

Here's another little aside. I've been playing around with ETOPO2 data using my new copy of Photoshop CS4, Wilbur and Flexify. I was inspired by Chris Wayan's work(here). The original data was in 21601 × 10801 resolution, but I think I'd need 64-bit windows to open that in Wilbur. Even my old PS8 ground to a near stop on that. CS4 chugged right through it, though Flexify took awhile to render...

So here is a slightly altered Earth, for your enjoyment. Oh I also have Burphaban as seen on GRASS.

[su_liam]

I've been kind of busy with job-hunting, but, since my ArcGIS license is closing down in june, I decided to pause and try doing a few things that are really hard in SAGA or GRASS. I've already mentioned what a champ ArcGIS is for georeferencing, so that's a biggie, but another thing that ArcGIS does really well is to convert raster line drawings to shapefiles. So I went a little crazy with ArcScan getting all of my rivers digitized.

I probably won't put any more time into this map for awhile. Job-hunting is a patch of hell, but a necessary one. I also want to use my last little bit of time with ArcGIS to georectify some other maps: Sadwillow, Carcharien, Wark and my CWBP entry need to get some basic work-up. Carcharien is one of my better world-building projects from my youth, with a worldmap generated in FWMG. The general shape of the continents is set in stone, but the planet deserves a better map... Sadwillow is my namesake planet, the homeworld of my current GURPS game, my old Nationstates country, and also my favorite name from Populous. Anyway, the mainworld of the Sadwillow Federation needs a good map. The Boroughs in CWBP clearly needs some help, I need to get back to it. Finally, Wark is sort of Craw backwards. It's a desert planet with a large polar sea based on the work-up of Craw in the JTAS article "A Referees Guide to Planetbuilding" by J. Andrew Keith. Think of it as a tribute.

Oh, yeah, I also need to work on Asdakseghzan, homeworld of the Vugoa, essentially early steampunk Vargr. Need a good map to detail the adventures of Aloysius Featherington Quadroon among the canine wogs! But God-DAMN did men used to have some proper-ass names

[gilgamec]

Here's another little aside. I've been playing around with ETOPO2 data using my new copy of Photoshop CS4, Wilbur and Flexify. I was inspired by Chris Wayan's work(here). The original data was in 21601 × 10801 resolution, but I think I'd need 64-bit windows to open that in Wilbur. Even my old PS8 ground to a near stop on that. CS4 chugged right through it, though Flexify took awhile to render...

Hmmm... Does ETOPO2 have bedrock elevations for Greenland and Antarctica? If not, where did you get them from? It took me quite a while to find additional DEMs to augment my global SRTM for my own "after global warming" mapping experiments, and I'm still not sure my projections are matching up correctly.

[su_liam]

It does. The actual soundings are pretty far apart, so there is a lot of interpolation. This is part of the reason why the shorelines are so smooth. You could get away with a lot of fudging around on the elevations since most of them are basically educated guesses.

I originally got the DEM as an ESRI grid, which I exported as a geotiff. Unfortunately, the tiff was signed, which caused some oddities. I later added the depth of Marianas trench to the DEM in ArcGIS and re-exported it to tiff. Much better, but no sign of sea level. What you see up there is basically that tiff rotated, downsampled and converted to png for rendering in Wilbur. No modifications on my part other than that and picking out an appropriate sea level. The sea level is higher than ours because there should probably be less land at high latitudes to intercept snowfall. Actual sea-levels are pure conjecture.

[su_liam]

Change is at Hand

Okay, I'm back. After a fashion. I've been stewing on some ideas for Burphaban for awhile now, and I think I'll post them up.

I recently acquired a copy of "The Planet Construction Kit," by Mark Rosenfelder(Zompist). The effect of this was to get me back to thinking about mapping and, for some reason, more specifically fantasy worlds. Burphaban is my fantasy world of choice at the moment, so I figured I'd try rebooting this thing.

The biggest revision I've decided to make is to remove humans, at least as a dominant species. There might be a few humans among the Goblin emigrées in Al Qallafiyeh, but they're not terribly significant. Other than introducing the Goblins to Islam. Yeah, I'm keeping that.

Part of the reason for ditching humans on Burphaban is because there are enough stand-ins for humans already. The Goblins are technologically advanced(less than they were when they got here, but still more than most of the rest of the world) followers of a human religion(Of course this means I have to research Islam...) and formerly part of a human interstellar polity. The halflings(I think I'll call them stoutlings, since they're actually about four feet tall, and my CWBP entry is gone now) are somewhat like friendlier, kinder, gentler stand-ins for humans. And the Orcs are pretty good stand-ins I encounter while enjoying highway traffic. So humans are pretty superfluous here.

Another reason for leaving humans out of the mix is that I already have plenty of species to deal with as it is. Why not skip the least interesting one? Besides, as time goes by I might have some humans land from elsewhere.

The really dominant reason(the gripping hand, as it were)is based on some discussions I had been having with Chris Saunders about his world of Tannin. I particularly liked his idea of a country of civilized orcs. So of course, I decided to give the formerly human Grand Imperium on the island of Angloia to those orcs. The Orclands in the north-central portion of the main continent are still run by your familiar, unfriendly, tribal mobs of psychotic backstabbing "normal" orcs.

I'm going to start by printing out some of my old head dumps and doing some editing. What stays, what goes. I want to make sure I keep the good stuff, ditch the bad stuff and work in the new stuff(which may prove to be good or bad).

[su_liam]

Some History

A long time ago, the people of this world, let’s call it Burphaban, all looked a lot like the stoutlings. About four feet tall, weighing around 145 pounds, hairy feet. Otherwise, these people were pretty much like humans. Nuclear bombs, computers, telecommunications, war, a few dozen people in space stations, a moon base, solar power satellites, fossil fuels and climate change, starvation amid plenty and morbid obesity, the whole bit. Just like Earth. Sometime in the 2030s, perhaps...

Then these proto-stoutlings learned to alter themselves. Not by genetic engineering, though they were as advanced at that as anything else. No, they learned to alter themselves by thinking about it. One might say by magic...

That wasn’t the limit of magic. The proto-stoutlings discovered that just about everything they did with their old-fashioned technologies they could do with their new powers. They could communicate to each other instantaneously over any distance, they could light up a room with a thought and a word. What few things they couldn’t do with magic, they could magically power.

In the early days of this new magical civilization, the people of Burphaban gloried in their ability to easily do things that once had been hard. Many people flew to the moon using their magical powers. Several flights were made to the nearest planets in Burphaban’s system. Some people even learned to change matter into antimatter to power the flight of fast probes to nearby stars. Finding the other planets in their own solar system to be dull, lifeless rocks and the other stars still too distant to conveniently reach even with their new powers, the proto-stoutlings quickly lost all but an aesthetic interest in the skies beyond their world. There was just too much they could do without leaving the comforts of their own pleasant world.

The people of Burphaban voluntarily separated into two broad groups. One group cared for the old-style machines and began to build extensive underground tunnel complexes and vast caverns to house their new civilization. Over time, they became uncomfortable with the open skies of the surface world. They began to specialize their skills to support the kinds of intricate, powerful and constantly tended spells needed to support the world’s new magical infrastructure: spells to light their caverns and grow crops in the vast subterranean greenhouses that were replacing surface agriculture, spells to desalinate the sea water they were using to irrigate those crops, spells to support ventilation of the hundreds of thousands of miles of tunnels they were delving, and spells to support all manner of other practical tasks needed for their lifestyles.

The other group stayed on the surface. They abandoned the cities, preferring to live among the trees, “in communion with nature.” This group built up their aesthetic sense based on open spaces, plants, wild animals and the star-strewn skies. They grew in their disdain for the specialization and solid, practicality of their underground cousins. Their arrogance drove them to a bitter anger over their dependence upon the underground people. Even as they saw themselves as becoming infinitely more wise than once they had been, new rivalries and old vices grew and them and would be the undoing for the new golden age that was just dawning. It would also be the source of a sense of humility, empathy and caution which would lead them, later, to a far truer wisdom.

Over about a century, these two groups separated into two very different races. Almost species. The first, underground group became the dwarves, or troglodytes or mole-men. Any of these names could apply; their own name for themselves might translate as People. They retained their former height. They saw no need to build larger caverns to accomodate a taller people. In their stolid practicality, they altered themselves to become more stolid and more practical. They became heavier, stronger, tougher and their senses became more adapted to handling the cool, damp, sometimes dark world they lived in. Their magic altered, too. Many specialized to handle the complex and continuous difficulties of maintaining the sophisticated systems needed for survival. Flashy, showy spells were discarded for quiet lasting and practical enchantments. Much of their magic required large groups working together on long and involved rituals. Dwarves prefered things to be well planned, well thought out, not spur-of-the-moment. Dwarves gained their greatest pleasure from problems solved, from jobs well done. Having attained what they considered to be a perfectly good, practical form, they discarded the ability to alter themselves. They had a life expectancy of almost a millennium, which they found perfectly adequate, and even the last few years when old age began to affect them, senescence was never terribly debilitating and death came gently.

The second group could be called the elves. Dwarves often referred to them as useless. They had a distaste for practicality. Much of their magic was dedicated to dispensing with hard work, which they found distasteful. Their lives were dedicated to art, music, dance, the development, enjoyment and enhancement of the natural environment, and advancement of the magical arts. The major work to which they dedicated themselves in a leisurely but devoted way was repairing the damage done to the world’s environment by the earlier industrial civilizations consumption of fossil fuels. They enjoyed their ability to change their forms and all elves have a tendency to slowly mutate throughout their lives following ever changing aesthetic preferences, seeking perfection. Elven magic is varied and often flashy. Magic is often part of their musical and artistic expression. Images shimmer and move, dancing is often accompanied by streamers of light and magically perfumed air, and singers are often accompanied by more than mere instruments. The metaphor of, “height is importance,” was obviously familiar to the proto-stoutlings and they have grown tall and graceful in general. Most elves generally chose to be five to six feet tall, towering over most of the other people on their world.

Before long everybody on Al Burphaban had taken the form and culture of either Dwarves or Elves. The proto-stoutlings were essentially extinct.

A long golden age followed for several hundred years.

Then an elf was born who would prove to be one of the most powerful elves ever and who would display and extend all of the worst attributes to which elves are prey. This elf, now spoken of only as, “The Dark One,” would bring an end to the golden age and nearly bring ruin to his entire world.

The Dark One was a great orator and had a great and probably magically-enhanced charisma. He was able to convince many elves to follow his quest for elven dominance with him at the head. His new army made war first against the dwarves, enslaving millions, then they found themselves at war with the other elves. The Dark One, enraged at the perceived betrayal by his fellow elves sought the total destruction of all who fought against him and began using old-style nuclear weapons against his foes. Even his followers were horrified at his use of such cruel and ecocidal and demanded that he stop. In response to this final betrayal, he tortured all of his followers brutally, using their own powers against them. When he was done, all of his followers were rendered into cruel, callous orcs incapable of resisting his evil will.

A group of surviving elves and dwarves gathered together for a final stand against The Dark One’s orcs and other twisted monsters of his creation. The Dark One smiled at that and launched all of his remaining nuclear and magical weapons against his enemies’ stronghold even knowing that the brutality of his attack would render the entire world a blasted ruinous waste. As twisted as he was with his own rage and evil, he didn’t care so long as his foes were crushed utterly.

As a final desperate attempt at defense, the elves and dwarves created a powerful magical Maelstrom that rendered the nuclear weapons and most other old-style technological tools temporarily useless and blunt the power of his magical attack as well. Fed by the power of the Dark One’s attacks, the Maelstrom proved far more effective and destructive than expected. The Dark One himself was drawn into the Maelstrom and much of the power that drove magic was drawn from Al Burphaban and the Maelstrom went on to spin about the world for decades more destroying many things before finally dissipating.

The golden age was at an end. The Orcs and other monsters created by the Dark One outnumbered the surviving Dwarves and Elves. Much of the old magic and even more of the old technology no longer functioned properly. No one truly understood how the Maelstrom functioned, all of the dwarven and elven wizards who participated in creating the magic superstorm were consumed by it along with the Dark One himself. Most of the vast dwarven tunnelings were flooded or no longer habitable.

The Orcs may not have seen much joy ahead of them in life, but they proved survival machines in themselves. They would do or say anything to survive for even another moment. Neither pride nor hope nor love nor empathy stood in the way of orcish survival. Though the life they had was ridden with the pain and dismay of their ruined forms they did remarkably well in the hellish aftermath of the terrible war.

The Dwarves retreated to their caverns to save as much as they could of their once great culture. With most of the magic they once used to light the agricultural caverns ruined, they needed to create farms on the surface. So they took control of the land above the great Al Kannadiyya mountains and as much as possible(for they did not like to spend a lot of time exposed on the surface)they hired other people to tend those farms. A few elves would take up the task of helping to care for the dwarves farms, but the task fell mostly to the new race of Stoutlings.

After the war many elves were wracked with guilt and humility over their part in the wrecking of the world. Some were followers who had escaped the Dark One before he converted the others to Orcs. Some remembered that they had quietly supported the Dark One in his early years. The vaunted wisdom of the Elves was great enough that they all realized that he was an expression of the great flaw of arrogance and disdain for others which they all shared. Some elves sought to develop their empathy, compassion and wisdom and work far harder to help the environment recover from a catastrophe greater even than the after-effects of the industrial age. Others however rejected the power which had made them so dangerous. This majority of the surviving former elves became the Stoutlings.

Unlike the Elves, the Stoutlings made themselves to enjoy hard work. In fact the Stoutlings became a race renouned both for its great honesty and for its work ethic. The work ethic and honesty, however was predicated upon their enjoyment of life. An employer who denies Stoutlings the right to sing and laugh while working will soon see his workers leave. Along with any necessary travelling expenses they might find in the till. Stoutlings also work on their own time. Theirs is not a work ethic of the more work done the better, but one of getting necessary jobs done without others having to work harder to take up your slack. Stoutlings do not approve of people enriching themselves on the hard work of others, nor of sloughing off jobs you find unpleasant on others. The average stoutling will cheerfully dive into a cess pool to dredge out useful fertilizer for the fields, if the boss shows a willingness to join them now and again. On the other hand they will throw up their hands in disgust and leave even the softest jobs if the boss shows contempt for the task or an unwillingness to join in. They are realistic in their expectations: they don’t hold the Dwarves fear of open spaces against them(particularly as they have shown themselves to be hard and cheerful workers at similar jobs in their caverns), nor will they expect a crippled person they are helping to join into physically demanding tasks. Mostly they need to be assured that their work is valued and that they are respected for it.

Stoutlings are quick to mild annoyance and display it just as quickly, but they seem incapable of holding grudges. The good humor and tolerant demeanor of Stoutlings has done much to make the world a more peaceful place. The first Stoutlings chose a shorter lifetime than either the Dwarves or the nearly immortal Elves. They usually live for about a ninety years before they start to show debilitating effects from aging. Usually, to start with they just start to get more sedentary after about their ninetieth year. By the time age starts to really make a Stoutling particularly uncomfortable, he is usually pretty close to a peaceful death, typically at an age of about a hundred years. Between about the age of thirty and ninety it is almost impossible to tell what age a Stoutling is by appearance or behavior. To human eyes, anybody in that age range would appear to be about forty to fifty years old. Even the typical Stoutling laying down to sleep on the night before his death will look no older than about sixty. Almost all Stoutlings die peacefully in their sleep.

[su_liam]

Although the Orcs were created essentially as an act of cruel vengeance to live without joy or hope, the generations of separation between Orcs alive today and those first sad victims of the Dark One have made them much more normal. They remain fairly callous, by nature, but they are not incapable of mercy and compassion. Orcs are capable of feeling love and affection, and often possess a circle of friends to whom they feel some degree of devotion. Orcs have a crude sense of humor, their music is clangorous and not always pleasant to non-orcish ears, and its difficult for outsiders to tell when their dances end and their brawls begin; their art is usually evocative of bloodshed and torture and their hopes and dreams revolve around vanquishing foes and gaining vengeance upon their enemies, but they have humor and music, dance and art, and they have hope. They often see this as their greatest victory: defeating the Dark One himself.

Most Orcish societies are small tribal bands, hardly able to cooperate beyond the level of family. The Orclands are slightly better organized: a short dynasty of kings has been able to dominate the various tribal chieftains of the region and hold them together loosely for two or three generations. The Grand Imperium on the southern island of Angloia is the only truly civilized Orcish society, a culture that has created its own cities and technologies and maintained them in a coherent fashion for centuries. In many ways, while Imperial orcs are still brutal, callous and bloodthirsty, and while they are still largely organized by a principle of violent Social Darwinism, most other Orcs would consider them strange and effete. Given the martial arts of the Grand Imperium those Orcs would be wise not to call an Imperial orc an, “elf,” to his face even if that’s what he’s thinking. Of course, being an Orc... He would! And so would an Imperial if the situation was reversed. All Orcs like a fight even more than they like winning one.

Trolls, interestingly, aren’t even people as such: they’re very bright animals. Probably as closely related to the proto-stoutlings as Homo erectus is to Man. The Trolls were actually created originally by a military genetic engineering experiment before the proto-stoutlings discovered magic. The big, dangerous creatures probably would have been quietly destroyed by their government if they hadn’t managed to escape into the wild. The Trolls managed to remain a mystery for quite a while after the advent of magic, occasional sightings raising them to the level of urban legend among the proto-stoutlings and later elves and dwarves.

In his youth the Dark One searched out everything he could find about Troll sightings, and he eventually hunted them down and came to dominate them. As he came to dominance, the Dark One was always surrounded by a group of Troll bodyguards on public appearances. Although he didn’t create them, the Dark One left his mark even more on the psyche of surviving Trolls than the Orcs.

Ogres were the result of hybridization between Trolls and Orcs. It gets worse from there, but their immense strength(nearly as strong as a Troll) and their ability to be disciplined in combat and tolerate close contact with other ogres, orcs and other people makes them useful to many Orc chieftains. It doesn’t pay to imagine how they accomplished the deed. Trolls have trouble tolerating their own kind enough to manage reproduction, usually the female crawls away barely up to maintaining pregnancy and the male only survives by dint of great toughness and luck(usually he doesn’t). Fortunately Ogres breed true and seem to enjoy the act. Often if their not carefully watched. They don’t mind much being watched, but they’ll usually lose interest after a guarding orc pokes ‘em a couple times with a spear.

Dragons were one of the Dark One’s greatest failures. After hunting down a species of flying warm-blooded reptiles(surviving dinosaur-analogues really) he was successful in imbuing them with demonic spirits causing them to grow immense, magically and physically powerful, and brilliantly intelligent and cunning, but they immediately fled from him and frequently attacked him and his servants when they unwisely came to close to the mountains where the dragons chose to hunker down. These fearsome dragons were a major reason for the survival of dwarven cities in high mountainous regions and have been a major challenge to the dwarves in their attempt to dominate those regions.

Vampires were the Dark One’s last attempt at creating demonic life forms before his defeat and perhaps his most successful. Vampires began as elves and dwarves captured by the Dark One’s minions before and during the war. Using an agonizing magical process more painful even than that used to create Mummies, the Dark One imbued those people with demons he had discovered in his explorations of the darkest magical arts. This rendered them essentially immortal(even longer lived than elves, some of his first-created vampires may yet be walking the land. Vampires are incapable of reproduction in the conventional sense(physically they are little more alive than a zombie or a mummy), but they are capable of reproducing, in a sense, by infecting still-living victims with a bit of their demonic nature. Vampire infection is slow, agonizing and recognizable enough to most people that the victim will usually be killed on sight if he doesn’t kill himself. To reproduce, the vampire usually has to kidnap its victim and hold him or her tightly bound till the infection runs its course after about six months. The vampire sire will then have his new vampire thrall as a very useful slave for several years until that one’s thralldom ends. The first act of a vampire when it leaves thralldom is to try very hard to kill its sire and take its place. Most sires try to kill their thralls before they reach that point. This is very fortunate for the rest of the world, because vampires are extremely aggressive and incredibly tough creatures, if their population growth was any more efficient they’d be a horribly dangerous existential threat to Al Burphaban. As it is their threat is mostly on a very personal basis to the people who encounter them. And that is an immense threat!

The Goblins showed up at the same time as the tiny population of humans. They were refugees escaping others of their species who wanted to kill them for following a religion of their hated enemy, the humans. These are pretty much as described previously. They retain some of the higher technology they brought with them from the stars and a relatively tolerant culture they inherited from their human friends. There was a great deal of surprise and consternation when it was discovered that mating between humans and orcs and humans and stoutlings actually resulted in live births. This led to a hypothesis, already well supported by the very human appearance of the natives, that the planet must have been seeded fairly recently with life from Earth. Things became more confused when the first Reptile Men were born.

Reptile Men were the result of matings between Orcs and Goblins, usually resulting from Orcish rape-and-pillage raids against Goblin villages. Since it was clear that Humans and Goblins had no shared genetic heritage it remains a mystery how this happened. Most people blame it on magic and stop discussing the matter.

That’s pretty much where my coredump is at at the moment, so I’ll stop. We’ll see where this goes.

I intend to mirror any activity regarding this world on my blog here. In fact, I suspect this thread will get more love because I'll be putting up WIPs more frequently than I'll put up finished blog articles.

Thank you for your patience,
The Astrographer(aka Su_Liam)

btw is there any way I could get the thread title changed to, "Al Burphaban?"