Creating

We’re world-building! World-building! Makin’ a world and livin’ in it…. I don’t know what any of you did last night, but I spent the better part of two hours last night alphabetizing the names on the world I’m creating, and then getting some basic facts like what kind of terrain they’re on, what their primary source(s) of revenue is (are), and what kind of settlement it is: vatenvilt, village, walled village, walled city?

Oh, I said vatenvilt. Think of it as a purely economic settlement; their sole purpose is to provide goods for travelers. No one “lives” in the boundaries of a vatenvilt, though homes – of course – exist outside them. Within the bounds of the vatenvilt are entirely under the control of the magiss – the magistrate. He keeps track of supplies, costs, fair measurements, etc. They are named after the founding magistrate. But I digress. Sort of.

87 names! Roads, rivers, villages, mountains, plains, and highlands – areas that are marsh eight months out of the year, and places that are so fertile it was once called “The God’s Feast.” Bit by bit, I see the towering rocks, see the slope coming gently down, turning green, and then swooping across a massive valley with homes and farms and herds of sheep and cows dotting the landscape. There’s a river, too, wending its way down the middle of the valley.

Then there’s the highlands; there, too, are mountains – though they masquerade as hills. But here, most often, the grass is scrubby and windswept – farming is toilsome work, and families barely scratch a living out of the dirt. But beneath those hills are minerals and precious ores.

Capping the northern coast is a forest of tall, ancient trees – hardy and sometimes precious wood that supplies the land with both practical and ornamental furniture and modes of transport. There are hardy people too, woodcutters and carvers and carpenters; people who smell of the trees upon which they subsist.

There is a failed city that tried to probe the massive wastes. They are at the end of the road; an appendix to a failed frontier. Yet they, too, survive in sun-parched lands by trading with nomads who circle around twice a year to do trade with the settlers.

It is a wonderful country of both human ingenuity and natural resources; the humans cut the trees, though they cannot make them grow; they farm and pasture the land, but do not supply the rain or the grass. As hard as life is, sometimes, from day to day, still they survive and move on – often, they only really do half the work. Yet they are blessed.

See you Monday.