#WroughtWorlds 24-03-30
Nothing this week, there was an event Wed that put me hard a'kilter and I didn't get around to making a Lego model or making a sketch to Illustrate the design for the "Eyes of Arunn" light house that I wanted to talk about / pickup on city building

#WroughtWorlds 2024 03-23 Cultures and People : Looks & Personality
This week is actually piggy backing off of the WordWeavers ‘tag “Which do you figure out first---MC's looks or personality? “ Originally I was going to touch more on City designs & structures, picking up from the other week talking about City Layouts + aesthetics, but my brain percolated on my succinct but admittedly cheeky answer to WordWeavers while I was at the thrift shop, so change of course 😀.


My autism has the flavour note of being fascinated with people. Sprinkle in some [redacted, trauma discussion] and my brain parses + reads people sort of like how Sherlock Holmes would parse details in a crime scene or by observing people.
I lack the mental machina to act on this information though when dealing with people in meat space.

But! Here is how it looks when writing


If I'm talking to someone in the #Tavernn , I see them, I understand them, and there's minor details I get/fill in from listening to them tell me their stories.

Whole-cloth characters on the other hand,
They precipitate from their cultures, so they are known 50% - 60% from the start, in both looks and personality. The other 40% - 50% is built from thinking about their minor stories that get summed up in a few sentence note. And those tend to go either direction of looks-personality or personality-looks but still happens nearly in the same instance.

e.g. "they wear finger-less leather gloves with Latigo reinforcement on the knuckles ever since the fight with Markkii when they were 13”

What most understand: They wear custom gloves.

What's actually there: They developed a paranoia that runs in the background of their mind, that they may need to defend themselves at any moment. The gloves reinforced for punching are an extension of this, and a subtle incorporation of a weapon/means of self defense that is always at the ready.

The looks and personality co-evolve as I think about where they started, where they’ve been, where they might be going.
It’s adjacent to how costume artists for movies use wardrobe design to shorthand certain traits/themes.
Except when writing it’s a two-way expression of personality and looks. They inform and shape each other. They evolve as the character evolves.

Tallia from Wytch-Fork:The Witch and the Wolf, frequently wears a hat during summer with an extra large brim. The hat is an amalgamation of the pointy-hat style we typically associate with stereotypical witches (such as the Wicked Witch of the West), and a farmer’s straw hat. The brim is a stiffened clothes that casts shade out to her shoulders, and above the hatband is a band of woven wicker in a honeycomb pattern before continuing into a short back swept peak that matches the brim.
The colour of the cloth parts are charcoal grey.

The points:
1. She has a certain aesthetic she likes ( “witchy” )
2. She values comfort. ( Large brim for shade/reduced sunburns, wicker part for stiffness and maximum ventilation
3. Charcoal grey is an easy to make dye, providing a deeper shade than the natural tan/tan-white of the cloth.

The takeaway:
Tallia prioritizes comfort and ease of maintenance, as a carry-over from the semi-agri centric culture she grew up in, and that feeds into the freedom of self expression she’s now able to exercise having escaped to Koruu-on-the-Bay.

Hopefully that illustrates the semi symbiosis of looks + personality that happens when I’m character building

#WroughtWorlds #Writing 2024 03-16 : World Building : Cultures and People : Cities
What thoughts do you put into cities/large cities?

This was touched on a bit in hashtag yesterday where I started talking about Twux people in #WytchFork.

Much like with real world cities, places such as Koruu are fairly metropolitan. They’re a mixing point of different cultures. Now given the abridged version of individual culture building I talked about a bit back, there’s a similar framework of questions.

The condensed list:
Geographic location
Methods of ingress and egress - where are people coming from
Physical layout

How the city is laid out & what materials+style buildings are fashioned in, set the tempo.
A bit like writing within a particular musical time signature.
Geographic location determines weather, which loosely functions to accent building styles, and social events + gathering places.
How people arrive in the city interlinks with where they might come from, and is influenced by geographical location. Ships lend to migrants from various far off lands. Landlocked cities conversely filter and slant towards more immediate lines of ingress.

Sculla Guna , coastal city, built partly into a dead volcanic ridge and field.

The city is shaped like a guitar pick with a few roots to underground neighborhoods.
80% of everything above ground is built with bricks cut from the grey/dark grey lava left behind (most of these bricks were once what is now the underground neighborhoods or ‘The Warrens’)

Off the coast a set of small finger shaped islands from a chunk of the continent fracturing and fanning away. This gives a natural break against incoming storm surges, and the islands closest to land have ship docs built on them for trade. There’s also an emergency dry dock for quick patches & the like, else ships go up to KotB where wood is more accessible to repair.

Because of the grey rock & buildings, when some families from more vibrant cultures settle there, so did their colour pallets. And their artistic sensibility spread. So the buildings in time ended up with an amalgamated style of sharp and bright colours and murals that I’d describe as a bit like a Nagal Print crossed with Oaxacan folk art. They’re colourful, play with negative space provided by the dark rock, and contrasted with vibrant colour.
This colour inturn ended up in the canopies that stretch between buildings to keep direct sun off the streets. If you hovered over the top of the city, the different colours of canopies for the districts combined with the dark rock buildings would look like an abstract stained glass window/sculpture.
Because Sculla Guna is an very busy port city, a certain amount of the population is constantly in flux. Some people are long term residents. Notable the Twux-Squam families who generally have 3-4 generations of family living in proximity, have their own quasi apartment buildinding or ‘Gen-house’ in local slang. They stay pretty much in the same building unless the whole family decides to move. The other longer term residents tend to be ship captains how used Sculla Guna as base port. They as well tend to have a ‘Gen-house’ but usually smaller and set up more like a barracks or dormitory for their crews to stay when not on ‘sea-shift’.

Feel free to ask me anything, I need to tapper off here for the night.

#WroughtWorlds 24-03-09

No question / topic this week. It was a long week of bad mental health, that saw my enthusiasm for two non-writing home-brew projects just collapse, and the ripples from that bent spoons in the writing department.

check back next week, I will hopefully have some brain to brain with.