Magic And Rules

Oh shit I’m being followed

a realistic study mood

you get home at 4, you planned to do your homework the moment you got home, you lay in your bed, you open your phone and begin to scroll, your phone alerts you you’re on low battery, you look at the clock, it’s now 7, you panic, you start your homework. you keep getting distracted it’s now 12, you plan to not do the same the next day.

31 Days of World Building: Wordsnstuff August Writing Challenge

– The monthly challenges are back by popular demand! I hope you all enjoy this one. This is the second installment of my three part series, dedicated to writing longer stories. Next month’s challenge will be dedicated to plot development. I look forward to seeing all of your guys’ responses here using the hashtag #wordsnstuffworldbuilding and over on Instagram, where you can tag me @ writingandsuch.

This challenge begins on August 1st, but I thought I would give you guys some time to plan stuff out, because you may need to switch some days around to accommodate your schedule. You’re free to do one day’s challenge on another day if your schedule doesn’t allow enough time to complete that day’s challenge. Best of luck to you!

☼ Prompt List ☼

Days 1-10: History & Geography

How does climate and weather change in the part(s) of the world your story occurs in?

Describe the landscape/layout of the major location(s) in your story. (Major buildings, natural formations, prominent mountains, where characters’ homes are situated, etc.

How have the species/groups/races in your story formed the relationships they have throughout history?

What major wars/conflicts/disasters have taken place in the timeline of history in your story? How do they affect your world and the beings in present times?

What recent history affects your story the most? What were the events’ initial effects and how do they compare and contrast to the long lasting damages/benefits?

Create two timelines; One that covers major events that have occurred since the beginning of your world as your character knows it, then one that covers recent events and time periods (about 500 years should do it).

To what extent does religion exist in your world and how has it evolved over time?

What does nature look like in your world? What plant species exist in your world? Which ones are rare and valuable and which ones are weeds? How do the beings in your world interact with nature?

What animals are present in your world? What areas of the world do specific species inhabit? Does poaching occur? If so, to what extent is it a major issue? What species are commonly domesticated, if any?

How have different species/beings/races been oppressed throughout the history of your world? How does this affect current relationships amongst different groups? Which conflicts have been solved/forgiven and which ones haven’t?

Days 11-20: Society & Culture

What races/species/groups coexist in your world? Describe them and their individual characteristics.

How many languages exist in your world? How do the resemble languages in the real world, if at all?

What major powers play large roles in your world? (i.e. churches, governments, monarchs, caste systems, corporations, etc.)

What does religion look like in your world? Do individuals of faith occupy the majority or the minority?

What are the major and minor opinions held by individuals in your world, concerning politics, morality, society, other groups, etc.

How do the names of beings/groups/individuals translate? How did they originate and how do names differ throughout the world? Are they more sacred and valued in some places than others?

What role does education play in your world? To what extent is it valued or required in society? How are uneducated individuals viewed/discriminated against, if at all?

What is fashion like in your world, if it exists? What do beings wear in your world, if anything? Is clothing an indicator of wealth or class?

To what extent is hygiene a priority to beings of your world? How do beings in different areas keep themselves clean and healthy?

What is the average life span of different species in your world? What aspects of science/evolution/design affect this? How are beings on opposite age extremes treated in society? How are the young and the old treated and how does their treatment differ from those who are not of those ages?

Days 21-30: Systems & Politics

How does your world function economically in your story? What is the currency system and what items/services are of most value in your world?

What political aspects of your story/world mirror real life and how might you convey these similarities through symbolism and abstract depictions of real life events?

How much of a role does politics play in your story/conflict and how does the political climate of your world affect your main character(s), specifically?

What major resources are plentiful and scarce in your world and how does this affect your character(s) as they try to solve the conflict?

What are the specific limits in various areas of science and magic within your world? If you don’t have a magic system, describe the realm of possibility when it comes to scientific capabilities, i.e, maybe in your world, time travel is possible but teleportation has not yet been invented.

What is ethical and non-ethical in your world and how much of a role does ethics play in law-enforcement/society in general?

Are the beings in your world concerned with issues like freedom of speech, equality, opportunity, fairness, and minorities? Do those issues even exist in your setting?

Who are the major world leaders and how do they govern the areas they have control over?

What technology/magic dominates your world? Is it exclusively used by a certain group/species/class? What are its limitations?

If magic does exist in your world, where did it originate? How was it originally meant to function/be used and how is it used in the present? How is magic viewed by different groups/species/classes?

Bonus Day 31 Challenge: The Things You May Forget

What food is common in your world?

How developed is medicine in your world? Is it anything like what we have on Earth?

How easy is it to get from one place to another?

**If anyone has any other aspects not mentioned in the list above that they feel is important to world-building, please leave those in the comments below for other writers to peruse!

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MY CURRENT WORK IN PROGRESS (Check it out, it’s pretty cool. At least I think it is.)

Damn that’s accurate

me: *is one day into summer break*

me: k so when can i go get my school supplies for next year

Simple tips of being more mindful

Go to sleep earlier (Listen to ambient music to fall asleep faster(or things like the Calm app)

Wake up earlier (Put your alarm far away from the bed so you have to get up and turn it off)

Don’t go on your phone first thing in the morning

Tell yourself that it’s going to be a good day

Stretch for 5 minutes

Make your bed

Drink a glass of water (Personally, I like to keep a litre of water in my room so i can have it as soon as I wake up)

Lay clothes out on the bed(Or, go one step further and set the clothes out at night)

Go shower or brush your teeth and wash your face if you shower at night

Put lotion on, put clothes on and apply makeup/do your hair as per normal

Watch a 5-10 minute motivational video (Youtube has Inspirational channels, Ted Talks etc)

Eat breakfast(Smaller bites, appreciate the taste), and drink more water and plan your day

Make your lunch

Now, if you have extra time you can look at your phone and scroll through social media a bi before you leave the house

Look for beauty around you, in the smiles of people, their fashion, flowers, architecture, interior decorating. Try to take in as much as you can.

Look up from your phone(Delete the apps you don’t need. Be honest about what apps waste your time)

Make it a goal to make someone’s day better, whether it’s by buying a homeless person a meal, or by smiling genuinely at someone. Brighten someone’s day.

If you have extra time, write a journal entry for the day. Write about what you noticed in the world, your goals, your feelings, what excites you etc. Write about your thoughts, let them flow through you.

Carry a book around with you and read it when you find yourself doing nothing.

Notice how much time you spend on your phone or laptop. Try to replace some time that you spend on silly things with educational things. (Read the news rather than scrolling through memes for an hour, read a motivational book rather than toxic tweets)

Learn.Learn.Learn. If you haven’t heard of something, ask what it is. Ask people to teach you how they do whatever it is they do. Don’t settle for no answer. Dig deeper. Learn.

When you learn something, try to see if you can explain it to someone else. If you can’t, try to learn a little more.

Be nicer to people. Ask them how they are, listen to their stories, learn who they are. You’d be surprised at all the interesting, educational stories that people all around you have.

Go outside every day. Enjoy nature.

Appreciate who you are and where your life is at. Appreciate that not everything happens perfectly or as planned.

Appreciate that you can learn anything if you put your mind to it,

Spread positive feelings.

Cut off anyone who threatens your positive vibes.

Cute.

Pink 💕

Apps used - Procreate for lettering and GoodNotes for the notebook 💗

Advice for World-Building

As a long time Table Top role-player, I have a bunch of top secret techniques for creating a fully fleshed0out world rather quickly. Especially when you need to give your players a place to explore on short notice. 

Here is an easy way to turn a small town that is basically just a quest-giving-tavern attached to a inn, into a rich, thriving civilization. The trick is:

Economics.

Ask yourself, what does this place make, what does this place need?

Establishing the economic landscape of the village and how it relates to the area around it can work miracles for world building. 

Does the town have a community of hunters? Once the meat is smoked how is it distributed/sold? Do they harvest lumber? If so how do they keep that industry sustainable without chopping down every single tree? Are there druids who calm the animal and regrow the fallen trees?

Does it have any specific artisanal goods? Who trains the next generation of craftsmen? Is this village the only one in the area that can craft this specific item? Does that make them a target for competitors who want their secret techniques? 

What local animals could be tamed to assist in transporting the exports? How does the local wildlife treat the villagers? Is there issues from monster/animal attacks and how does the village defend itself?

What goods are important enough that the village will invest in protection from bandits while transporting it? If they easily produce tons of wheat, but it takes a lot of effort to grow sugar cane, who do they trade that sugar cane to in order to get a return on investment?

Once trade is complete, who gets the profits? Is there a merchants guild or union that makes sure the profits are fairly split? Or does a mafia control the flow of money? Is this town a branch of a larger trade union so there are hostilities between the locals and the out of town guild members? 

What resource does the town lack? What resource would cripple the town if it was suddenly cut off or their trade partner couldn’t produce enough of?

Once you are able to answer a few of these questions quickly, you can establish a locations unique identity with only a few of these points.

When you combine two of more of these question you can start to build a narrative that can facilitate stories. 

Example:

The Old Lor-Ahmek Parish:

Produces: Gold, Iron, Stone, Jewelry, Well Trained Archers

Requires: Labour, Produce, Transportation, Fabrics.

The abandoned castle once belonged to a vassal of the old King. The bitterly cold lands were given to a young lord as a show of good faith during a treaty signing. The lands turned out to be un-farmable since it was so far North that the harvest season was too sort to turn a profit. The lord sunk most of his fortune in building his massive castle and died in poverty. The land was returned to the king and was then gifted to a small sect of monks and turned into a Parish for study and meditation. 

It was a costly slice of land since it had no exports, until an excavation intended to expand a catacomb revealed rich deposits of iron and gold underneath the mountain. 

The parish was not equipped to become a full smithery so the iron and gold needs to be transported through the treacherous badlands to a warmer village in the South, where they have enough coal and lumber to keep their furnaces lit.

The monks of Lor-Ahmek study alchemy and various sciences, so while they can’t work with the materials on a large scale, they do craft jewelry and delicate accessories while they experiment on new metalworking techniques. 

In order to dig the monks brought in prisoners from the central kingdom to work off their crimes in the mine, and they spend their nights trying to convert lost souls. Because of the long stretches of cold badlands, Lor-Ahmek makes for a very functional prison. No one can escape without enough food and clothes to survive the blizzards. Many prisoners become monks themselves once their sentence is paid off, since it is easier than trying to escape. Not to mention day after day of the monks persistent conversion attempts tends to wear them down.

Due to the large amount of ex-prisoner converts, the monks of Lor-Ahmek are hardened and trained in various forms of combat. The wide variety of prisoners brought from all across the world means that Lor-Ahmek is a melting pot of diversity. The sharing of cultures has created a unique cuisine of hardy stews and spiced meats. The delicious warm foodstuffs attracts travelers that plan on heading further North and the upper layers function as one large tourist trap.

The stone brought up from the mine in search of more ore has been used to build wind-resistant walls the dot the desolate landscape. Guard patrols run from wall to wall and have to train their archers to fire with the curvature of the wind. The central kingdom sends their elite archers here to train them in cover based combat, as the conditions of Lor-Ahmek result in archers who can curve their long ranged arrows and hit enemies behind cover.

Food is often scarce and large cave dwelling bat-creatures are raised for their meat and milk. The archers hunt the rabbit-creatures and elk-creatures for meat, and when the massive rhino-moose migrate, it is almost a rite of passage to hunt one of the enormous creatures down as a team. The rough hides of the local fauna are useful, but Lor-Ahmek often trades for finer furs from the South to line their clothes for warmth. Vegetables and fruit are expensive delicacies, since only root-tubers and mushrooms grown in insulated mine shafts.

The King often has to pay mercenaries and merchant caravans to move dangerous prisoners to Lor-Ahmek in exchange for the precious minerals, so a strict royal merchants guild controls the parishes finances. The Monks have taken a vow of poverty and the prisoners make no money so nearly all of the profits go to the King, covering the cost of transportation by the profits made off the gold and iron. 

The monks and prisoners have to maintain the ancient crumbling estate and since profits go to the King, very little is provided for upkeep. Grey handmade clay mortar (dug up from the mine) is used for repairs, giving the buildings a cold, unsettling aesthetic. 

The mine itself goes deep into the earth and uses a massive network of pulleys and elevators to move stones and ore. Cave-ins happen as the mine-shafts dig outwards under the surrounding tundra, and sometimes they run into warrens that belong to dangerous burrowing monsters. When this happens the tunnel is intentionally collapsed and the prisoners within are often left for dead.

Already this location provides for many quests and plot threads, such as:

A bounty is placed on one of the Monks: A violent prisoner has paid off their debt and found peace at the parish, but the family of the victim still wants blood. The other monks refuse to let their new brother go since they consider his past sins forgiven, and the target has to be convinced to give himself up, taken by force or allowed to escape his bounty.

A gang of criminals wants you to go into the mines and rescue their trapped comrades: A cave-in trapped some prisoners that were members of a gang. The leader of the gang knows the monks and guards will not spare the men to rescue the prisoners. The gang can’t pay you much but you will earn the favor of the gang if you save their friends in time.

A caravan was lost in the blizzard: The yearly trade caravan of ore was run off the road by a blizzard and the monks worry they will be found by bandits before they get back on the road. A lot of survival and tracking skills are needed to brave the harsh climate and find the lost merchants in time, if they are not rescued the Parish is in great financial danger.

Transport a valuable reliquary: The monks have been using gold to craft a powerful alchemic reliquary and need to hire couriers to move it South undetected. However, this reliquary contains powerful magic and there are shady individuals willing to pay you more to NOT complete your quest.

Ghosts in the Mine: So many prisoners have died untimely deaths in the hungry mines that ghosts are appearing, and hindering the mining operations. Adventurers who can banish the dark spirits will be well rewarded to cover up the indifference of the monk overseers. 

Master Archery Challenge: An elderly guard has valuable information for the adventurers current main quest, but he won’t share his secrets until a member of the party proves themselves on the ice fields. A high level ranger or rouge might be able to compete against the Master Archer and victory might result in learning the secret techniques of the Lor-Ahmek. (Basic Ranged Attacks now ignore cover bonuses.)

There are lots of other techniques for fast world building but building stories through what they need/have is one of my favorites. 

Let me know if you want to see more guides to World-Building/Character Building.

Part 1/?

next->

Sure. Why not?

back to school

i know, i know, i’m a little bit early. it’s all good, i have anxiety, i plan ahead constantly. i figured i’d share some of my plans to prepare myself for heading back to school.

1. fix your sleep schedule

for school i wake up at 6:30, in the summer i wake up at 12. and recently i decided to fuck that up even more by pulling an all-nighter and just, in general, screwing up my sleep schedule. i’ll need about a month to fix all this damage, but in general, you should start reacquainting yourself with your school schedule about two weeks before you have to head back.

2. figure out your note keeping system

i’m switching things up this year, and i won’t be using the binder system i’ve had all throughout high school. it’s simply to heavy for my walk to and from school. instead, i’ll be using a filing folder, and keeping loose leaf paper, as well as the week’s lessons in there, and once the week is over, i’ll transfer my notes to the binder system at home, which should limit the weight i carry. also, this’ll force me to have better organization, and hopefully make weekly review easier. just as a rule of thumb, refreshing your note keeping system is something you should do annually, at the start of a new year or even before a new semester; you know what’s been working and what hasn’t been.

3. gather breakfast ideas

i have about ten minutes scheduled in my morning routine during the school year for breakfast. and about five of those minutes are spent figuring out what to eat. i want to gather simple breakfast ideas that i can test out now, so i don’t waste time deciding what to eat. this just, in general, makes mornings less of a hassle and can help make sure you’re getting a good start to the day.

4. take stock of your supplies

i need a lunchbag and highlighters, my previous ones are no longer able to function, so i need to replace them. i don’t, however, need new pencils, i have plenty. doing an inventory check can really help prevent buying duplicates of something you thought you didn’t have.

5. create achievable goals

this year is my final year of high school, and then i’m off to university, most of my goals centre around applications and just graduating. but there are other things i know i need to do. embracing study habits for one. i’m hoping to do so by staying in the library after school instead of walking home right away because i know i can’t get work done as effectively at home. i’ll also be doing a review for exams all throughout the year, instead of the day before, by creating flashcards and mindmaps for each days lesson. set a general goal, then add the steps you’ll need to take to achieve it.

6. check your courses

i’m dropping out of physics because i don’t need to be taking it and it will give me a spare instead of a full course load. i need to talk to my guidance counsellor before school starts because of it. as well, i like to make sure i’m in the correct classes and that my schedule is as balanced as possible. some schools may not allow this for regular students, mine does. make sure you’re taking what you need to take and what will allow you to succeed.

7. put dates in your planner

my school offers a tentative list of events going on through the year, with set exam and break times. i like to keep track of these, and setting them in my planner makes it easier to see how my year will play out. if your school doesn’t offer this, check out past years scheduling so that you have a general feel for how your year will go.

these are just some of the things i’m doing to ensure this year goes smoothly for me. let me know what y’all are doing too!

7 Ways to organize your laptop because we can always be a little more organized on our devices (including myself).