Harsh Realities

The first thing to tackle is the age-old question: why are humans here? No, not the philosophical one, the practical one. How did they get to this planet? Or is this Earth?

I’m actually going to shy away from answering the question and simply say, “We don’t know yet.”

Humans are here. How do they live?

Tribal and nomadic, humans live out on the ice flows. They build their homes from ice blocks. They hunt animals for fur and leather. They scavenge for their “tech”. And they have some pretty decent tech, for a stone-age society. In fact, inexplicably, they have metal that has been hammered and shaped into weapons and tools. Knives, short swords and spear tips represent the largest elements of metal, but it begs a question: where did it come from? The humans do not display the skills of smithing or metallurgy, where did they get the metal?

For distance weapons, the humans use leather slings to fling small rocks or ice chunks with the occasional short-bow using a bone-tipped arrow. The short-bows are made from the bones and leather of animals. There is no wood. They don’t last very long and the sling is clearly preferred. Making arrows out of a fibula is not as easy as carving them from wood.

Homes are built similar to igloos, with the ice providing a barrier against the wind. Body heat and burning of dung and scrap leather provide some small amounts of heat, but the primary sources of heat are bodies. Large extended families tend to live in the same hut.

Males hunt. Females gather and care for the young. Dogs are kept and raised, pulling sleds and providing body heat on the cold nights inside the igloo huts. Extended families stick close to each other and “old wisdom” is valued. The younger humans care for the older humans, even if they do not provide tangible value to the community. Alliances are formed by trading of children when clans come into contact with one another. Boys are valued as strong hunters, but girls are also valued for their ability to keep the clan alive. It all depends on what the particular clans need when they come into contact.

Relations betwen the humans and the other sentient races depends entirely on the clan. Some of them respect and trade with their neighbors, others hunt and war with them. One thing is certain, wearing an Ursani or Kanoor skin while trying to discuss or negotiate with them would be considered a significant insult…

Occasionally, a human clan will possess something truly … unusual. Items or gear that are completely foreign and clearly unnatural. There are rumors of other clans who are not nomadic, that live in permanent settlements in caves or on rocky outcroppings, but the distance is more than any of them can fathom.

There are certainly several cultures for the Ursani, but we shall focus our attention on the Targa

Based largely on an extended communal living arrangement, the males tend to form hunting groups, or “packs”, of three to ten individuals that take up residence in a den-structure located on the perimeter where the females take up residence. Homes are built underground by excavating cavelike dwellings into the ground. Many pack-dens are located in a loose perimeter around the central dens.

The central dens are arranged in a cluster around a larger common area where meals are shared by the females and the young, the whole thing is called a “nest”. Communal living only goes so far, offspring seldom leave their mothers for extended periods. Ursani are, in fact, pheromonically locked to their direct relations. An Ursani can instantly determine if a scent is a family-member and can generally tell how distant a family member. Mothers and children are “scent-bonded”.

Interaction between males and females is sparce and limited. When females are in season, or feel the urge to share the company of a male Ursani, she will trek out to the perimeter of the encampment and make her interest known. Males will generally compete with one another for her attention–up to and including physical combat. Interestingly, the female grows weary of the contests and frequently chooses an onlooker for her companion. Unfortunately for the males, they haven’t quite figured this out and still fight and compete for her attention. The winner is often bewildered when he finds his “prize” disappearing over a snow-dune with a male who wasn’t even involved in the contest.

Males have almost no interaction with their off-spring. Once a female has successfully bred, she returns to the family “nest” and begins preparing for the birth. Other females help and nurture the pregnant ones, reducing their need to hunt or work to accomodate the pregnancy.

Male offspring are ejected from the family nest about the time that they begin to display sexual aggression. There is a short period of time spent in the intervening area between the nest and the perimeter as the young buck finds a place in a hunt group, or pack. This is accomplished through mock combat with the leader or second in a pack. There is no way that the young buck could hope to best a fully grown, experienced pack-master. It is typical that the young buck considers the combat a serious affair–but the experienced bucks know the truth. The fight is short and to the point. It ends with the young buck on his back with the pack-master’s teeth at his throat. From this point on, the young-buck is a member of the pack.

Seconds seldom fight for the leadership of an existing pack. When the pack-master and his second determine he is ready (it is a joint decision), the second selects two or three other members and asks them to join him in creating a new pack. Once the new pack is created, both are more willing to accept young bucks into their ranks.

Occasionally, once or twice a year, the whole group comes together for a celebration. Males march inward and females move outward until a ring around the nest is established. During these times, there is a sharing of resources, exchanges of gifts, exchanges of DNA and much partying. During these celebrations a father may encounter his offspring for the first time. They will instantly be aware of their relationship through pheromones and the father tends to avoid them. This has served the Ursani for millenia as a method of avoiding incest at the celebrations.

Other than the celebrations and the short-term mating rituals, males and females develop separate lifestyles. They worship different gods, they follow different routines. In many ways, they are like separate sub-cultures.

The Targa society depends heavily on trade relations with other societies of Ursani–and these trade relationships sometimes require the exchange of off-spring, which helps to deepen the gene-pool.

The Targa need more development, but this is a good start. Next, I’ll detail the human culture. After that, we’ll circle back around and flesh out the Kanoor or develop another culture fo the Ursani.

I’m still hoping for some outside input, too.

Firstly, Ladybex, to answer your comment on the previous post, the Kanoor, as I see them, are very similar to gerbils or “kangaroo rats”. As you know I like to play with words, Kanoor is drawn straight from “kangaroo” (drop the “ga” and reverse the “roo”).

The culture of the Kanoor immediately springs to mind from their biology. The females birth the young, but the males nurture them. Thus, they would tend to have a close-knit familial structure. The father must have some means of feeding the young in the pouch, so they are not–as humans would think of themselves–strinctly “all male”. Nor are the females strictly “all female” (lacking in a pouch and mammary glands, for instance). Thus, some of our “humano-centric” views on gender will need to be suppressed.

As we further examine the Kanoor, notice that they live on an ice-world and the males tend to be darker furred while the females tend to have white fur. Fitness for the survival would indicate that the females are most likely the hunters and gatherers outside the warren, while the males tend to remain in a protected state. These elements present the first few building blocks for our fledgling cultures.

Let’s extrapolate the first culture, then.

Communal lifestyle wherein the males tend to be the caregivers and form the cement of relationships while the females are the hunters, gatherers and warriors of their tribes. Males nurture the young, within the warren as much as possible, under the watchful protection of the female huntresses. For this first culture, I’m going to extrapolate that the males tend to form monogamous bonds, accepting offspring from only one female for life (unless she dies, in which case he may find another). The females, however, freely mate with any available male–tending toward the young, unattached males if they rut away from their pair-bonded male. In fact, since they are hunter-gatherers, they sometimes encounter males in other tribes, thus spreading the seeds and keeping the ecology diversified.

Leadership rests in the warrens, with a social leader and a war leader. The social leader tends to be male, concerned with the maintenance of the warren, distribution of food and other resources while the war leader occupies her (predominately female) role protecting the tribe. Males, being the more social, are sometimes assigned roles within fighting squads to take care of the needs of the fighting females (particularly if they birth young while away from the warren) and handle ambassadorial type duties (being the more socially minded).

Males are also exchanged with other tribes, which makes more sense to take some along now and then for the purposes of trade and genetic diversification.

Due to the weather–extremely cold and windy–Kanoor need more than their own fur and generally use the skins of other animals as coverings to help protect them from the brutal winds. Within the warren, the custom of wearing clothing over the “bare spots” has become normal fare, though it is not taboo to walk about without clothing over their fur. Huntresses seldom wear clothing while on active hunt–as their natural coloration is an advantage and it also provides freer movement to be unclad.

There is a lot more to detail, but this is a good start.

Now that we have our spark to start the fire, let’s turn our thoughts to the details of the gameworld.

Decisions need to be made about what populates the world. Will there be variant races? I’m leaning toward some variation here. Perhaps not the “new race in every valley” method of some games, but two or three differenct races seems to add an interesting level of detail.

Since no one has stepped up to make suggestions, I’ll toss out the ideas that I’ve developed.

1) Kanoor: Wiry, slim, fur-covered, with a slightly elongated snout and ears that can rotate to scoop up sounds sprouting from the upper portion of their heads. They have a slightly rat-like manner to them, with claws on their hands and feet and “backward bent” legs, excellent for jumping. They are marsupial–but the males have the pouch. Females birth the young, who then crawl into the pouch of their fathers for nurturing. Males tend to have sandy or even black fur–females are nearly always white-furred, with occasional colored markings.

2) Ursani: Large, bear-like creatures with thick fur and six limbs. Their fur is universally white. The upper set of limbs are absent claws, but have six digits–with two opposable thumbs, one on each side of the palm. The middle set of limbs lack opposable thumbs–but have heavy, sharp claws. Their feet are splayed, with the digits stunted in comparison to the hands, but have the same double opposable thumb configuration as the upper hands. Ursani tend to walk on all six limbs, but sit on their ample haunches when resting, using their upper hands to manipulate food or tools.

3) The ubiquitious humans. Just like you and me.

We’ll start working on cultures in the next post.

First things are first: the idea.

Some would say that you need to pick a genre (fantasy, sci-fi or horror), but I disagree. Genre is a means of classifying something after the fact. Don’t bog yourself down with this detail to begin.

Think only of the spark–the idea–to create the world. It can be simple or complex. It can be a picture seen in a book or a scene from a movie or television program. You just need the spark, the fire will come.

For the world that I will begin detailing here, the spark of idea is simple: I’m tired of the heat in September and I want cool air–we will create a world of ICE.

Using the image of world of ice, there are a few cultural elements that immediately jump into mind–Hoth, from The Empire Strikes Back, for one. This leads to several more questions to be answered, but I’d like to mull it over…

(or hope for some input in the comments: hint, hint ).

I’ve been very busy working on some actual world design that will be included in future releases from Harsh Realities. Thus, I haven’t had a lot of time to devote to the theories for this page.

In the near future, I’ll start up a program that creates a world from the ground up. For that, I’d very much be interested in some input and feedback on what to include and adapt. If anyone is following this and has suggestions or recommendations, please feel free to comment.

Some of you may be thinking that the gameworld should be centered around some “cool aspect”–the magic, the technology, the setting, the world itself. I would disagree.

The gameworld should be focused on whoever is doing the action. Thus, if you have a world of peasants, rising to become heros in a world full of richly exotic magic, then the actors are the peasants. The rest is just seasoning. Sometimes it can become a bit blurry, but with some careful thought, you can find the actors and focus your attention on them.

Thus, magic, psionics, yakuza, super powers, aliens invading the earth all become “spices” in your stew. The real focus, however, are the slices of ingredients.

In a world where the players are gods of a pantheon, struggling against other pantheons for rulership of the world, I wouldn’t expect much attention to be paid to the peasants. At that point, the peasants become part of the spices (if they are interesting enough) or–much more likely–simply part of the “cook time”, the history.

In a world where the average Joe is thrust into a worldwide conspiracy, the average Joes need to be detailed to a much larger extent. (There are some caveats here, for instance, in a “modern world”, you don’t need to do nearly as much detailing if you can simply convey the tone that it is “just like the world you live in”.)

In a world of supers, it’s easy to make the mistake that it’s all about the super powers. But this would be a huge mistake. It is all about the people who have the powers and what they do with them. The powers, then, are just “spices” to the supers who possess them.

Focus, then, on the actors. Consider the other elements the “spices” in your stew.

You can only take analogies so far, but let’s continue with the “stew” idea.

Your races make up your types of ingredients (potatoes, celery, carrots, sausage), but your cultures are your individual slices of the ingredients. Each slice is different, though made up primarily of the whole. Each one, however is tainted and flavored by the whole. Sometimes you’ll find a piece of sausage with a small chunk of potatoe nestled in the curl. The flavor is that of the stew juices, the spicy, meaty taste of the sausage, melded with the starchy, solidness of the potato. Quite a different flavor than just a piece of potato or sausage by itself.

Your cultures–the specific slices of each of the ingredients–are really the flavor makers of the world. It has always bothered me that culture is rooted so tightly with races. While I don’t question that races play a huge factor in the development of the culture, it is those subtle differences that make the world so … flavorful.

Marinated beef in a stew can make a huge difference to the flavor of the whole, but specifically a flavor of bite that has a chunk of that beef within it.

So, as you think about your Gameworld, imagine the way that each of the pieces will affect the whole, but don’t forget how each piece is, in turn, flavered by the whole.

Start out with a basic stock: Beef, potatoes, carrots, celery, onions, corn, green beans.

As you slice up your stock, imagine each one being a town, village, city, conclave, religious order–all of which goes into the making of your cultures.

When you get to your spices, think about the magic of garlic (and how closely it ties to the onions–a race in your world), the deities of salt and pepper, the subtlty of the earthy bay leaves suffusing the stew as it cooks. I always like to dash a little tobasco into my stews, to give them a solid bite that leaves my mouth tingling after I’m finished.

And don’t forget the most important element: cook time. Your world needs a history, legends. It needs time for the spices and the juices and the ingredients to mingle and mix. Sometimes a good boil (wars, turbulent times, cataclysms) can bring out the flavors even more.

Then there is the steeping, to let the stew flavors settle into the whole.

Every stew is different, every world is different.

I’ll move on past the theory and into some specifics soon.

The site is taking shape and while it does, my thoughts begin to focus.

I’ve been making a lot of stews and soups lately. The allegory seems appropriate that world design is a lot like a good stew. You add a lot of flavorful elements to create a palatable delight. However, the flavorings need to blend well together. The right blend of spices, herbs and seasonings are necessary to bring out the flavor of the primary elements. While it’s possible to make a stew just by tossing a bunch of things together, it will be just another meal in the long memory of your lifetime.

But a memorable stew–a really good stew–will be something you’ll remember (and try to recreate) for many years.

That memorable stew with just the right kinds of vegetables, prepared in exactly the right way, with the perfect spices–that is a stew to remember. I’ve made a few of them in my life. I know I’ll make a few more. But, I’ve made hundreds of stews and I’ll make hundreds more. I’ll only find that perfection a few times.

And so it is with world design. You’re making a stew. You’re adding the elements, the races, the cultures, the civilizations, the powers, the world rules to bring out a world full of flavor, rich in texture–or just another meal.

Chefs study the culinary arts to create masterpieces of appearance and flavor. World design should also be studied and learned.

I don’t claim to be an expert. I may just be a professional. But, at the very least, I’m an enthusiast.

Take my words with a grain of salt.

Reality isn’t nice.

Reality isn’t friendly.

Reality isn’t easy.

For many people, reality is a real problem.

It’s not going to be much better here in the Harsh Realities, but at least we’ll be honest about it!