Fantasy Kingdoms, scale, and era
Dec. 6th, 2012 11:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI've been poking websites to find out what 'city' meant at different bits of history. Turns out early on it usually meant somewhere smaller than Dereham. Like, Norwich: "The Domesday Book states that it had approximately twenty-five churches and a population of between five and ten thousand." (wiki). Or "By the time of the Domesday Book, in 1086, Norwich was one of the largest towns in England with a population of about 6,000. Although that seems tiny to us settlements were very small in those days, a typical village only had 100 to 150 inhabitants. By the 14th century the population of Norwich had probably grown to about 10,000." Dereham's 15K would be, like, woah, huuuuuuuge! Entire millennia of human history couldn't get their head around having that many people in one place.
I feel I have learnt this before, but I can't get my head around the scaling down necessary to imagine this stuff. I mean, my town is tiny, it only has five churches and two high schools and a weekly market! ... ah, yes, that's quite a lot, really.
Plus the dozen or so pubs, many of them in varying stages of being turned into chinese restaurants or kebab places. It's depressing when a pub that's a couple hundred years old closes down, even though I hate alohol. Used to be you could navigate by them, nice shiny signs sticking out being distinctive, but now if they're not being closed they're being renamed the Rat and Parrot or something. My feeling is if a pub has been getting along with the same name for about five hundred years, you don't turn it into anything else, let alone the rat and parrot. It's been changed again after that, but not back to the proper name, so we're all left calling it 'that place that used to be the Lamb', which is probably no use to newbies.
ANYway, I'm trying to imagine my medieval-or-earlier adventurers, and the idea that they might think they lived in a gigantic metropolis if they had as many as a dozen pubs to choose between is... *blinks* *woah*
Then there's churches. I want fantasy world atheists, but that means figuring out what functions the church held and what would replace them. It was too central to just yank out without collapsing everything around it. I started the day by trying to design a big meeting hall for a medieval city, so I wondered what 'big' was in the context, or how many people could sit in a cathedral at once. I didn't precisely find that answer, due to getting distracted, but an RPG scale floorplan of a cathedral was one of the things I saw yesterday so I could probably go back and grab that to modify, if I wanted to pay for it.
Fantasy novels seem to have scales set at 'one spectacularly large city', the fantasy equivalent of a London or Venice, anomalously huge, or 'at least one continent'. I can't think of one set between a couple of counties. Stories wander all over the map, and the map is gigantic. I know we can blame Tolkien for just about everything, but I also blame America. America is big. Bigger than that. Probably bigger than that too. I saw a map with Texas put on top of Europe, and it made it look like everything I ever learned about history in school, including the 20th century, would fit in Texas. I don't know where Britain would fit in. I don't know if there's a bit of America small enough. So then even when stories aren't globe trotting, they can cross this whole huge continent, and used to, in search of adventure and excitement and killing new and interesting people. Fantasy stories seem to scale up to fit something that size. But there was really a lot of history happened in much smaller places. English history filled up a lot of lessons, and the geography involved was pretty tiny, by epic fantasy standards. I mean, when you start talking about two neighbour kingdoms with an epic grudge, it's hard to think about England and France in a fantasy novel, yet they managed really a lot of grudge wars. And then there's civil wars, or the wars Britain had with other bits of Britain that didn't at that time consider themselves part of Britain, nor want to be. If the pitch for a fantasy novel started 'imagine if Norfolk and Suffolk had an epic war going on', I feel it would be hard to sell. But neighbouring regions had some serious grudge matches going on, and stuff like the Wars of the Roses just kept rolling for more than thirty years, and only resolved by the two sides getting married and being one side after that. Someone should totally get on making a Fantasy version of that.
Place names from real history can work excellent well for fantasy versions. Like, from the War of the Roses, there were battles of Wakefield, Mortimer's Cross (complete with signs and portents), and Hexham, that I think sound like an Undead campaign waiting to happen.
Casualty figures for Wakefield on wiki: about 2500 casualties.
That seems a lot more in fractions-of-Norwich.
The Battle of Towton is on a whole other scale. Wiki: "largest and bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil".
"According to chroniclers, more than 50,000 soldiers from the Houses of York and Lancaster fought for hours amidst a snowstorm on that day, which was a Palm Sunday. A newsletter circulated a week after the battle reported that 28,000 died on the battlefield."
That's actual multiples of Norwich. *shudders*
Sometimes looking at history for inspiration feels really ghoulish.
... hence the undead armies...
I looked earlier in history as well. Tudors and that have had a whole lot of story about them already, hard to be remotely original or file the serial numbers off enough. Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms covered much smaller chunks of Britain and still managed to have a whole lot of fighting.
Also I like it when Anglia was a Kingdom. And some of the others had good names, like Mercia, which was the Midlands. It's supposed to be meaning border people, but it's only Mercy if you don't look it up.
The ecclesiastical center of Mercia was at Lichfield. Wiki reckons there's no truth in the theory that means 'field of the dead', but that's because truth is often a spoilsort. It's from 'grey wood' instead, meaning ash and elm. But "The last public burning at the stake in England took place in Lichfield, when Edward Wightman from Burton upon Trent was executed by burning in the Market Place on 11 April 1612 for his activities promoting himself as the divine Paraclete and Saviour of the world." (wiki)
There's a nearby place called Wall, but wiki doesn't say if there's a particular Wall it's named for. Sounds like the one in Neil Gaiman's Stardust though.
Mercia ate the smaller kingdom of Hwicce, an area that includes Worcester, Cirencester and Wychwood Forest. The name-part persists in Whichford and Wychbury Hill. Those don't need much tweaking to sound like witch queen territory. ... in the wiki article someone apparently tried that on actual history. Fun.
Mercia also ate a kingdom right next door to it that's on the map as Magonsaetan. *blinks* There were more like that too; Pecsaetan means Peaklanders, and the Wreocensæte, or Wreconsaetan, means Wrekin-dwellers (Wrekin being a big hill in Shropshire). So it don't mean anything that exciting. And yet...
I already found Helvellyn as a useful place name, a mini mountain with a Red Tarn on top. Wiki reckons it was the traditional border between Cumberland and Westmorland, which are now in Cumbria. Westmorland has a flag with a gold apple tree on it, which, if I borrowed it, would look like a rip off of Minas Tirith. Well, not look like, it's a very peculiar looking tree to call an apple tree, but certainly sound like. But it would make such a good ingredient for a story. There's a silver mining area in the region somewhere, and a hamlet called Leadgate. During the Early Middle Ages Cumbria formed the core of the Brythonic kingdom of Rheged. In my head that sounds like Ragged. Which is a pretty good name for a fantasy kingdom, I reckon.
I've pretty much been wandering around maps imagining what a fantasy genre version would be like with that name. There's places called Bury and Hyde. Also Reddish. Once you put them in a book they're sort of too on the nose. Blackpool, Sale, Walkden, Middleton, Whitehaven, Failsworth. They all sound like storybooks if they stop sounding like places with tarmac and cars and stuff.
Cataractonium is Catterick now. The town of Cataract, or Waterfall, is a plenty good name; even the going blind association can be useful in a story. There are waterfall trails in the North Yorkshire tourist site, but apparently this name was a misunderstanding of the local word for fort walls.
Yorkshire's got the district of Craven. Also the River Derwent, probable home of the Deira kingdom, whose name meant Waters, unless it meant Oak.
Their neighbours were Berenicia, or Bryneich, "Land of the Mountain Passes" or "Land of the Gaps".
The two kingdoms were 'united by force', a phrase which conceals more than it reveals, methinks.
The king then went on to subjugate Elmet. *blinks* ... names are amusing.
Probably far back in history is less popular cause you need letters of the alphabet the keyboard no longer provides, but if you just sort of polish the names so they look like they sound now, tada, fantasy kingdoms.
... actually far back in history rapidly makes it clear how skinny 'history' is, since you find things mentioned in one book ever, and that only a few lines. Tad bit harder to draw historical inspiration from one line.
So I wandered around looking at maps and forgot my original population-research aims. But found plenty of good inspiration places.
At some point I will do actual work. It's just actual work requires actual concentration, and if you end up skating off to learn the history of the Brythons it's a problem, rather than a refreshing changes.
I feel I have learnt this before, but I can't get my head around the scaling down necessary to imagine this stuff. I mean, my town is tiny, it only has five churches and two high schools and a weekly market! ... ah, yes, that's quite a lot, really.
Plus the dozen or so pubs, many of them in varying stages of being turned into chinese restaurants or kebab places. It's depressing when a pub that's a couple hundred years old closes down, even though I hate alohol. Used to be you could navigate by them, nice shiny signs sticking out being distinctive, but now if they're not being closed they're being renamed the Rat and Parrot or something. My feeling is if a pub has been getting along with the same name for about five hundred years, you don't turn it into anything else, let alone the rat and parrot. It's been changed again after that, but not back to the proper name, so we're all left calling it 'that place that used to be the Lamb', which is probably no use to newbies.
ANYway, I'm trying to imagine my medieval-or-earlier adventurers, and the idea that they might think they lived in a gigantic metropolis if they had as many as a dozen pubs to choose between is... *blinks* *woah*
Then there's churches. I want fantasy world atheists, but that means figuring out what functions the church held and what would replace them. It was too central to just yank out without collapsing everything around it. I started the day by trying to design a big meeting hall for a medieval city, so I wondered what 'big' was in the context, or how many people could sit in a cathedral at once. I didn't precisely find that answer, due to getting distracted, but an RPG scale floorplan of a cathedral was one of the things I saw yesterday so I could probably go back and grab that to modify, if I wanted to pay for it.
Fantasy novels seem to have scales set at 'one spectacularly large city', the fantasy equivalent of a London or Venice, anomalously huge, or 'at least one continent'. I can't think of one set between a couple of counties. Stories wander all over the map, and the map is gigantic. I know we can blame Tolkien for just about everything, but I also blame America. America is big. Bigger than that. Probably bigger than that too. I saw a map with Texas put on top of Europe, and it made it look like everything I ever learned about history in school, including the 20th century, would fit in Texas. I don't know where Britain would fit in. I don't know if there's a bit of America small enough. So then even when stories aren't globe trotting, they can cross this whole huge continent, and used to, in search of adventure and excitement and killing new and interesting people. Fantasy stories seem to scale up to fit something that size. But there was really a lot of history happened in much smaller places. English history filled up a lot of lessons, and the geography involved was pretty tiny, by epic fantasy standards. I mean, when you start talking about two neighbour kingdoms with an epic grudge, it's hard to think about England and France in a fantasy novel, yet they managed really a lot of grudge wars. And then there's civil wars, or the wars Britain had with other bits of Britain that didn't at that time consider themselves part of Britain, nor want to be. If the pitch for a fantasy novel started 'imagine if Norfolk and Suffolk had an epic war going on', I feel it would be hard to sell. But neighbouring regions had some serious grudge matches going on, and stuff like the Wars of the Roses just kept rolling for more than thirty years, and only resolved by the two sides getting married and being one side after that. Someone should totally get on making a Fantasy version of that.
Place names from real history can work excellent well for fantasy versions. Like, from the War of the Roses, there were battles of Wakefield, Mortimer's Cross (complete with signs and portents), and Hexham, that I think sound like an Undead campaign waiting to happen.
Casualty figures for Wakefield on wiki: about 2500 casualties.
That seems a lot more in fractions-of-Norwich.
The Battle of Towton is on a whole other scale. Wiki: "largest and bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil".
"According to chroniclers, more than 50,000 soldiers from the Houses of York and Lancaster fought for hours amidst a snowstorm on that day, which was a Palm Sunday. A newsletter circulated a week after the battle reported that 28,000 died on the battlefield."
That's actual multiples of Norwich. *shudders*
Sometimes looking at history for inspiration feels really ghoulish.
... hence the undead armies...
I looked earlier in history as well. Tudors and that have had a whole lot of story about them already, hard to be remotely original or file the serial numbers off enough. Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms covered much smaller chunks of Britain and still managed to have a whole lot of fighting.
Also I like it when Anglia was a Kingdom. And some of the others had good names, like Mercia, which was the Midlands. It's supposed to be meaning border people, but it's only Mercy if you don't look it up.
The ecclesiastical center of Mercia was at Lichfield. Wiki reckons there's no truth in the theory that means 'field of the dead', but that's because truth is often a spoilsort. It's from 'grey wood' instead, meaning ash and elm. But "The last public burning at the stake in England took place in Lichfield, when Edward Wightman from Burton upon Trent was executed by burning in the Market Place on 11 April 1612 for his activities promoting himself as the divine Paraclete and Saviour of the world." (wiki)
There's a nearby place called Wall, but wiki doesn't say if there's a particular Wall it's named for. Sounds like the one in Neil Gaiman's Stardust though.
Mercia ate the smaller kingdom of Hwicce, an area that includes Worcester, Cirencester and Wychwood Forest. The name-part persists in Whichford and Wychbury Hill. Those don't need much tweaking to sound like witch queen territory. ... in the wiki article someone apparently tried that on actual history. Fun.
Mercia also ate a kingdom right next door to it that's on the map as Magonsaetan. *blinks* There were more like that too; Pecsaetan means Peaklanders, and the Wreocensæte, or Wreconsaetan, means Wrekin-dwellers (Wrekin being a big hill in Shropshire). So it don't mean anything that exciting. And yet...
I already found Helvellyn as a useful place name, a mini mountain with a Red Tarn on top. Wiki reckons it was the traditional border between Cumberland and Westmorland, which are now in Cumbria. Westmorland has a flag with a gold apple tree on it, which, if I borrowed it, would look like a rip off of Minas Tirith. Well, not look like, it's a very peculiar looking tree to call an apple tree, but certainly sound like. But it would make such a good ingredient for a story. There's a silver mining area in the region somewhere, and a hamlet called Leadgate. During the Early Middle Ages Cumbria formed the core of the Brythonic kingdom of Rheged. In my head that sounds like Ragged. Which is a pretty good name for a fantasy kingdom, I reckon.
I've pretty much been wandering around maps imagining what a fantasy genre version would be like with that name. There's places called Bury and Hyde. Also Reddish. Once you put them in a book they're sort of too on the nose. Blackpool, Sale, Walkden, Middleton, Whitehaven, Failsworth. They all sound like storybooks if they stop sounding like places with tarmac and cars and stuff.
Cataractonium is Catterick now. The town of Cataract, or Waterfall, is a plenty good name; even the going blind association can be useful in a story. There are waterfall trails in the North Yorkshire tourist site, but apparently this name was a misunderstanding of the local word for fort walls.
Yorkshire's got the district of Craven. Also the River Derwent, probable home of the Deira kingdom, whose name meant Waters, unless it meant Oak.
Their neighbours were Berenicia, or Bryneich, "Land of the Mountain Passes" or "Land of the Gaps".
The two kingdoms were 'united by force', a phrase which conceals more than it reveals, methinks.
The king then went on to subjugate Elmet. *blinks* ... names are amusing.
Probably far back in history is less popular cause you need letters of the alphabet the keyboard no longer provides, but if you just sort of polish the names so they look like they sound now, tada, fantasy kingdoms.
... actually far back in history rapidly makes it clear how skinny 'history' is, since you find things mentioned in one book ever, and that only a few lines. Tad bit harder to draw historical inspiration from one line.
So I wandered around looking at maps and forgot my original population-research aims. But found plenty of good inspiration places.
At some point I will do actual work. It's just actual work requires actual concentration, and if you end up skating off to learn the history of the Brythons it's a problem, rather than a refreshing changes.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-06 01:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-06 02:41 pm (UTC)Orbis is pretty awesome for that. Roman travel times. That can be tweaked for a bunch of different travel methods.
London the Constantinople: 122 days.
... that's a lot of days of nothing much happening.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-06 03:27 pm (UTC)Getting between the two took 3 days on foot, less than a day on horse relay.
That's like Manchester to Lancaster, but on Roman roads to Roman places instead.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-06 03:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-06 06:25 pm (UTC)Mallerstang at the start of the Eden Valley is rather pretty
http://www.visitcumbria.com/pen/mallerstang-valley.htm
On the other side of the Eden Valley are the North Pennines.
So we've got a valley with two rows of mountains around it, like in the place in my head, and a river going up the middle, kind of like the place in my head. It's a lot less populated than the place in my head. In the Lake District there's Keswick up by Derwent Water, population currently 5K, which is kind of what I was imagining for my fantasy town. They have a stone circle. They have a market on Saturday, chartered since 1276. They used to mine graphite for pencils. Their River Derwent leads out to the west coast at Workington, current pop. 25K, area famous for coal, steel and iron. Somewhere in between is Cockermouth, which did cloth, spinning and weaving. I am really trying to ignore that place though because the name isn't even pun worthy, it's too obvious. Yet how could I resist? *ignore ignore*
That coast is also up by Sellafield nuclear power stations and waste reprocessing. For a secretly post apocalyptic fantasy world, that's just fun.
Leave Keswick in the other direction and you're heading for Penrith in the Eden Valley. The name might mean Red Hill. As well as the Eden it has rivers Lowther and Petteril. They were on the Roman road from Manchester to Carlisle. Current population 15K, like Dereham. Unlike Dereham they had a castle. It's a bit ruined now, but was nice and solid in its day. Ruined castles are of course essential for proper adventuring, though those particular ruins would need jazzing up a bit in order to hide anything particularly shiny. There's a bunch of other ruined castles in the same valley though, so I'm sure one of them would be suitably adventurous. Brougham Castle is right near, and has more walls that go up more than one level. Penrith also has a couple of henges nearby. It has a lot of wells and there are well dressing ceremonies. They have a mayday carnival. And there's a nice photo of some very pointy geography you can see from there. I'm always impressed by geography that goes up and down; I live in Norfolk, we only have one hill and they built it to put a castle on it.
Penrith sounds nice.
... so I'm thinking of it as a site for a zombie apocalypse...
Across the valley in the North Pennines bit there's not so many place names. You have to zoom in quite a lot to find any. Apparently humans like settling in the soft bits, who knew?
There's a Hexham on the far side; it started as a monastery, of which only the crypt built from Roman ruins survives, and it has a current population of 12K. ... I suspect I'll be going back to that.
But I wanted two mountainous places staring at each other.
Zoom in substantially more and there is a place called Alston. It's on the start of the Tyne, the same river that goes through Hexham, then obviously through Newcastle-upon-Tyne and out the East coast. It is one of the highest elevation towns in the country, at about 1,000 feet (300 m) above sea level. It's in the absolute middle of nowhere by British standards, more than 15 miles from the next nearest town, in an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It has a population of about 1K, most of them men.
... no, really, they launched a campaign about it when they found a ratio of somewhere between 10 and 17-1. Wiki wouldn't lie about something that important...
Area rich in minerals, particularly lead (like the town in my head). Mining has shaped the geography.
It had a Roman Castrum, Whitley Castle. It was, uniquely, built wonky, as a lozenge instead of a rectangle, because a rectangle wouldn't fit. It was probably there to protect the lead-and-silver mines. Either that or they got very lost, they're a long way from a road or a wall.
(Lead and silver is also like the place in my head.)
Lead, silver, zinc, coal, and fluorspar mining.
Gave its name to Fluorine.
First discussed in 1530 as useful flux.
That's a new one on me. It looks pretty in the picture though. Sadly it seems it's much smaller than the picture. But I'm writing fantasy, so I can have giant crystals if I feel like it.
Ooh, different colors...
... and I was not looking at pretty crystals a minute ago. Right then:
Alston: "In the 13th century, the area was known as the silver mines of Carlisle—silver was found in a high proportion (up to 40 troy ounces per long ton or 1.2 g/kg of smelted lead) and was used to create coinage in the Royal Mint established in Carlisle for the purpose."
They were mining money. Win.
There's sheep farming (the farming of choice for when bugger all else will work, far as I know.)
They had a foundry for a while, but it closed. ... and a dude called Bilbo started the stainless steel Precision Products place that employs most people now.
Alston has a big underground drain built in 1776 to drain the mines, big enough you can go down it in a boat. Underground. It's apparently difficult to access now, but still there.
Underground canals? Useful...
Alston is up on the Pennine Way, so there's a very long (268 mile) footpath to follow.
"The population census figures show that at its peak during 1831 the population of the parish of Alston Moor was 6,858 people."
Now that's more like it, that's the kind of people numbers I had in mind. Not in the era I had in mind, but lalala, I make things up.
I know, I just poked a lot of maps in a way that looks like not making things up, but I thought of the places in my head first, and then I poked the map until I near enough found them.
So, Alston in the East has lead-and-silver mines, and Keswick in the West has... graphite?
Somehow I feel that needs work to fit a fantasy setting.
Other places around Hellvellyn on the map: Ambleside, a 2.5K market town with a lot of pubs and a campus of the University of Cumbria teaching Outdoor Studies, and Windermere, an 8.25K town with a tourist attraction lake, which grew around a railway station. Keswick is actually the most interesting one. Though I could use the parts for a whole area that is academic and pencil based with an appreciation of beauty and poetry. How that gets into a fight with a bunch of miners and smiths is... a bit meta. Stretching a bit further out of the mountains and doing something where one side mines iron and the other side mines flux and then they have a falling out... might work better if I knew owt about mining and/or iron.
The idea was for two towns that are practically staring at each other across what ought to be very pleasant land, but now there's zombies, which are pretty unpleasant and make it very difficult to cross that valley. The two sides were having a fight when the zombies started and the East is pretty sure the West started it, fight and zombies both. East reckon they're all rising sun shiny pure, very clean and silver. West are more about the red and the iron. East makes a moral panic thing out of that. I know a lot more about the East because my guy lives there.
Thinking stuff up from a blank page is a lot more difficult than going through a bunch of wiki pages and going hmmm, yes, no, yes, yaay, no no no. Plus reality has the advantage of having actually worked at some point, so it has a functioning economy and realistic mineral distributions built in. They don't tend to mention zombies, but areas that got attacked a lot or times right after plagues can give a bit of an idea. (Plagues just emptied Europe the hell out. Seriously, population plummet, ghost villages, all sorts. If you ever have the illusion of consistent progress, the things can only get better theory, actual history with its repeated plummets is a bit of a shock.)
So I just spent the entire day researching actual geography and history to use as the backdrop of a fantasy story with zombies.
... win.
The internet is awesome. Not so many years ago this stuff would be in libraries at best, and maps were flat paper things, and you couldn't flip between views and get the bumpy view and the satellite imaging to play with. Google maps is wondrous. And wiki is just right for casual browsing. Obviously awful for academia, but since I'm looking for inspiration rather than accuracy, just right for this.
*hugs the internet*
no subject
Date: 2012-12-06 05:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-06 06:34 pm (UTC)But I was thinking more like :
day 10, on a boat
day 30, still on a boat
day 60, different boat, am on it
day 90, boat no longer looks like a word
day 120, boat boat boat, boat boat
no subject
Date: 2012-12-06 07:04 pm (UTC)http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm Medieval demographics made easy
has a generator to do the maths parts
http://qzil.com/kingdom/
but you need to put in square miles of area for your kingdom.
So I went to look up how many square miles there were in Norfolk, East Anglia, Cumbria, Northumbria, Mercia...
Northumberland 1,936 sq mi, but Northumbria the old Kingdom was quite a lot more counties than that. Can probably add together
North East England: 3,317 sq mi
Yorkshire and the Humber: 5,953 sq mi
(which gets you 9270)
Yorkshire on its own was 3,669,510 acres, or 5733 sq mi in the google box.
North West England 5,469 sq mi
adds together Cumbria, Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Cheshire.
Cumbria on its own: 2,613 sq mi
Mercia was the Midlands
East Midlands 6,033 sq mi
West Midlands 5,020 sq mi
(total 11043 sq mi)
That's not the most accurate ancient kingdoms measurements ever, but it'll do for current purposes.
So somewhere between 5500 and 11000 sq mi is a good chunk of old kingdom. Good to know.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-06 07:10 pm (UTC)Population: 462000
Urban: 13340
Village: 402460
Isolated & Itinerant: 46200
City 8836 133 acres
Town 2650 42 acres
Town 1854 29 acres
Villages: 1006
Universities: 0
Castles (Urban): 2
Castles (Wilderness): 6
Ruins: 2
---
that's the low end. the next generator came up with City 11.5K, Town 5K, Town 3.5K, Town 2.5K, Town 2.2K
---
Northwest England?
Town 7K
Town 2K
378 villages
1 Urban Castle
3 Wilderness Castles
pop 230K
---
so that's a fun generator to use.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-07 01:25 am (UTC)I spent a good portion of my teen years in rural Arkansas. We lived in a town of ~550 people (with 7 churches; it's called the Bible Belt for a reason); one school, for grades k-12 that was about 500 students and drew from three towns + non-town areas around them.
Sister-town, about six miles away, was less than 100 people (with only 3 churches). Nearest doctor was in a town 10 miles away, small family practice, in a town of 10,000. Nearest movie theatre was a drive-in 15 miles away--the other direction from the town with the doctor. Those places were probably all established before automobiles, but they wouldn't have grown as big without them.
And yeah, fantasy stories are often built on "American Frontier" concepts of space... lots of small towns, a few huge cities way out of proportion, and long empty spaces in between them, dotted with towns along the main trade road or river. I'm trying to think of novels that are based on what happens in a few neighboring districts, and failing. (Although Mercedes Lackey's Velgarth has, I believe, pretty much European-sized countries.)
Not sure how you'd get medieval-esque/fantasy-world atheists, other than cheating (like the Pern series, starting with formerly high-tech culture as a background). Religion and spirituality are, as far as we can tell, universal or at least ubiquitous forces in human culture. There doesn't need to be a specific believe in deity, and especially not the all-powerful focused-on-humans deity idea, but humans make legends, and legends beget myths, and myths beget lore and ritual.
And in a low-tech setting, it's hard to remove the lore-and-ritual keepers from government, because they're the ones who maintain and guide the cultural identity as a whole, and who *else* would you want involved in important decisions?
"Remove religion from a human culture" is every bit as huge a step as "remove pair-bonded couples from a human culture." There's plenty of ways to do it, but none of them are just going to work smoothly without a *lot* of consideration about how it works and why it showed up in the first place.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-07 08:10 am (UTC)Different places and times have different concentrations of people, habits of housing and community, different ways of living. And it's a real imaginative stretch for me to try and understand the variety.
I can't really get my head around it. Hence the fun from trying.
I don't reckon post-apocalypse fantasy as cheating, just as its own genre. And yes, secretly post zombie apocalypse was what I was going for. Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic; any sufficiently advanced science fiction is indistinguishable from fantasy ;-)
Post zombie apocalypse I can see a lot of different religious responses, including belief in evil gods or distant gods or that the judgement happened and god isn't paying attention any more. Is likely to make some changes though.
I agree about legends-myth-lore-ritual. I meant atheism kind of like (some, by my limited understanding, mostly theoretical) Buddhism, where there aren't separate orders of creation, no gods and angels, just humans who figure things out. Some of them get epic powerful, but it's all science and philosophy, cause and effect, not praying to some benevolent beard in the sky. And there's no final judgement, maybe no afterlife, just recycling. Atheism is a clunky summary for that, probably not the right word.
But I wanted to extend current British social trends to increased secularism. And see if it worked as a fantasy world. It works as science fiction, Star Trek went there for humans.
Labyrinth/Mazes
Date: 2012-12-29 10:27 pm (UTC)http://www.astrolog.org/labyrnth.htm
maybe
no subject
Date: 2013-12-16 06:44 pm (UTC)Hellvellyn: landing and launching biplanes on top