janewilliams20 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
janewilliams20) wrote2012-10-05 10:03 pm
janewilliams20) wrote2012-10-05 10:03 pm
Maybe instant knowledge at my fingertips isn't ideal?
Usually, yes, it is. Obviously. But yesterday I was trying to pick a poem or two to post for National Poetry Day, and I kept thinking today about poems I've liked and been haunted or inspired by, and Ozymandias came to mind.
Today, I wondered vaguely who the real Ozymandias had been, and hit Wikipedia to find out. Egyptian king. Fine. I nod, and move on.
But way way back, when I was still in school, I didn't have the Internet to find out things like that. It wasn't in the big encyclopaedia, or any other books round the house, or, on a quick look, in the library.
So, still being curious, I made it up.
No, I don't mean a little story about a king and a statue. I hit this from two angles:
1) A language where "Ozymandias" actually meant "king of kings". "Ozy-" was a modifier, so "Ozy-X" meant "X of Xs". I forget quite when this was, but I was still close enough to French and Latin O levels to be happy playing with languages, and I had a sister who later on would get a degree in linguistics. We invented a language, complete with grammar, irregular verbs, and quite an extensive vocabulary. It was called Cremanto - the language of the people of the kings (a few centuries earlier the full formal name, "Cremandiasmoto" would have been used, but it had become elided with time). What we produced wasn't up to Tolkien's standards, but that was what we were aiming at.
2) We have a place that was once the heart of a kingdom, but is now a desert. Why?
I'd recently read an article about climate change, where I learned inter alia that Marco Polo had reported the steppes of central Asia as being fertile - the effects of the Himalayan rain-shadow had made that much difference, in that short a time.
I decided that when the kingdom was at its height, it too had been a fertile place, but climate change had made it too dry for habitation. A little more reading showed me that the Sahara had once also been fertile. Fine, there was my model, I just wanted to accelerate things a bit.
And then things expanded. This world acquired plate tectonics. It had radiation levels, and mutation rates, a little higher than ours. It had the same "magic" in terms of crystals, ley lines, pyramids sharpening things, power in gemstones, etc, as ours did, only at a higher level, so there was no doubt at all about things working. Different mutated versions of humans (still capable of interbreeding, but very different races), utilised different forms of magic. So you had short stumpy people living in mountains who used the powers of gemstones, slender people in forests who IIRC used ley lines... oh, and over to the east, that increasing rain shadow from the Himalaya-equivalents had caused the herders there to come over all aggressive and move west in search of new lands, riding their wolves. Dwarves, elves, orcs.... only I knew why they'd changed to be different interbreeding races.
I had maps. I had histories. I had ancient heroes. And, years later, I ran an RPG campaign there - the party did eventually, by meddling with ancient secrets, land up next to that statue, and see the ancient abandoned city nearby, the one where in its last days, the slums had been torn down and replaced with huge covered cisterns in an attempt to provide a water supply.If I'd had access to Wikipedia, back then, I'd never have created all that.
Today, I wondered vaguely who the real Ozymandias had been, and hit Wikipedia to find out. Egyptian king. Fine. I nod, and move on.
But way way back, when I was still in school, I didn't have the Internet to find out things like that. It wasn't in the big encyclopaedia, or any other books round the house, or, on a quick look, in the library.
So, still being curious, I made it up.
No, I don't mean a little story about a king and a statue. I hit this from two angles:
1) A language where "Ozymandias" actually meant "king of kings". "Ozy-" was a modifier, so "Ozy-X" meant "X of Xs". I forget quite when this was, but I was still close enough to French and Latin O levels to be happy playing with languages, and I had a sister who later on would get a degree in linguistics. We invented a language, complete with grammar, irregular verbs, and quite an extensive vocabulary. It was called Cremanto - the language of the people of the kings (a few centuries earlier the full formal name, "Cremandiasmoto" would have been used, but it had become elided with time). What we produced wasn't up to Tolkien's standards, but that was what we were aiming at.
2) We have a place that was once the heart of a kingdom, but is now a desert. Why?
I'd recently read an article about climate change, where I learned inter alia that Marco Polo had reported the steppes of central Asia as being fertile - the effects of the Himalayan rain-shadow had made that much difference, in that short a time.
I decided that when the kingdom was at its height, it too had been a fertile place, but climate change had made it too dry for habitation. A little more reading showed me that the Sahara had once also been fertile. Fine, there was my model, I just wanted to accelerate things a bit.
And then things expanded. This world acquired plate tectonics. It had radiation levels, and mutation rates, a little higher than ours. It had the same "magic" in terms of crystals, ley lines, pyramids sharpening things, power in gemstones, etc, as ours did, only at a higher level, so there was no doubt at all about things working. Different mutated versions of humans (still capable of interbreeding, but very different races), utilised different forms of magic. So you had short stumpy people living in mountains who used the powers of gemstones, slender people in forests who IIRC used ley lines... oh, and over to the east, that increasing rain shadow from the Himalaya-equivalents had caused the herders there to come over all aggressive and move west in search of new lands, riding their wolves. Dwarves, elves, orcs.... only I knew why they'd changed to be different interbreeding races.
I had maps. I had histories. I had ancient heroes. And, years later, I ran an RPG campaign there - the party did eventually, by meddling with ancient secrets, land up next to that statue, and see the ancient abandoned city nearby, the one where in its last days, the slums had been torn down and replaced with huge covered cisterns in an attempt to provide a water supply.If I'd had access to Wikipedia, back then, I'd never have created all that.