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Got it hard.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: No, everybody.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: Are you guys seeing anybody come in the chat

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: I'm presenting so I can't see the chat quite yet. Oh, yes, there we go. Hello! We're so glad that you're here. I am chastity. I'm from providing a thank you for joining us today, and we're super excited to get started. I see the chat going. So you guys hopefully can hear me, and everything is going.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: I am in Virginia, and we have 2. Lovely speakers that are going to join with you today. But I'm going to kick us off with a little bit of an introduction

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: 1 s. There we go.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: Sorry my screen is that okay? I was all the way at the end. Sorry. Welcome to the Science Fiction writers. Week for 2023. So I will share these notes with you, and I will introduce our speakers

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: so always like what the top questions, how to access replays, replays will be about added to the hub once they're done like processing through zoom the time it just varies but it will be added as soon as possible, and replays are available to everyone for a week after the event. So that'll be until September 20, eighth.

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and then after these

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: date, then it's only available. If you're in the pro-writing Academy, if you're a member of that. But you do have access for up to a week

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: and then for right now, during our Science Fiction week there is 40% off the yearly providing a premium license, and with the premium license you can unlock tools like advance suggestions, author comparison, full integrations, prescriber, word, and lots of other awesome

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: things that integrate with providing a it'll improve your entire chapters. You get in depth, genre specific reports on unlimited word, count, and that's the difference. If you have a free version, it is limited to 500 words. So when you upgrade to premium. You have an unlimited word, Count.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: and then create your editing experience. Create snippets, dictionaries, custom rules, and they'll so that offer also ends on September 20 eighth. And it is more information in the Hub.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: So we want to keep talking science fiction writing. And you can join our online community using the your pro writing a blog in here you can keep talking with other Science fiction, writing fans and keep up to date with more of our writing events. And then I will also. Here's the link, but I will link it in our chat, too. As well, and I'm gonna keep an eye on the chat, so I will be in there linking some things.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: and then I'm going to if you have specific questions for Janet and Demetrius, you can pop them into the QA. Box, because it's a little easier to track that way. You should see it at the bottom of your zoom features if you like to chat with other viewers, obviously use the chat. Link to your offers and from our speakers will be a little on the Science Fiction, the writers we come and in the Participation guide. And so there's the link to the Hub, and I will also link that in our chat a little bit.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: So that is all for that part. And now I'm going to introduce you to Janet and Demetrius. So hold on 1 s.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: I have some awesome bios to read which are super fine. Janet is a published fantasy author, game developer, and secretly a Velocir. She could probably better than I get, and has been building world since

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: she was knee high to an org. In 2,017 she founded World Anvil, and the award winning world, building, writing and Tabletop, Rpg. Platform, which was a community of almost 2 million users, and as a writer Janet has published short fiction and several collections, was the lead. Author of The Dark Crystal, Rpg. In 2021,

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: also has written for infinite black cobalt press, pinning dragon games and tide Breaker, and is notorious for sneaking dinosaurs into everything she works on.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: And then we have Demetrius, and he has been building settings for 30 years and has made more epic sand box worlds that he has had hot dinners. He holds degrees in computing social psychology, which is always useful for tormenting characters and graphic design, and worked as A. CTO. For some of the top agencies in the UK.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: He left the corporate world to focus of world on world anvil, which is now his life's work with his wife Janet, and he developed the ground, breaking agile world building method, and has given talks and seminars at some of the biggest conventions in the world on the world building and game mastery.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: He loves cheese, lemon pies, and top hats so welcome, and we're so glad that you do are here. We can't wait to listen to what you have to say.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Thank you very much for giving us trustee. Yeah. So if you wanna shall we screen share? Yes, I think it's a screen share. So thank you very much, guys, for being here. We'll be presenting you now with what we have to talk about. Yeah. And today we're talking about

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: well, building the file frontier. So those of you who are familiar with Star Trek, and I imagine some of you are passingly familiar with Star Trek will recognize some of the references from this seminar that we've put together, and what we really wanted to focus on today is the the swathe of world building

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for sci-fi, specifically, and there's a lot of things that we're gonna talk about that might feel quite sciencey. Some of you will be super excited by that stuff.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: My nerves, some of you will feel like, okay, this is quite a lot of science based information. I will remind you that some of you will be writing hard, sci fi. So these will be research topics to go and read up on. Some of you will be writing software sci fi, where the technical details don't necessarily have to be as specific and correct. In which case, take this stuff as inspirational material to get your

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: world building of creative juices flowing and start thinking about the possibilities of storytelling. So that's why I will say, on the gamut of hard sci fi loads of scientific deep details and data and astrophysics all the way to soft sci fi, where basically, we we want some aliens to tell some human stories.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Everything is okay. Everything is welcome.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Take this as it's meant. Take it in the spirit that is going to work best for you absolutely.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: So you've already heard who we are from that lovely introduction. Thank you so much for that. We are done it. And Demetrius. We are a husband and wife team. In twenty-seventh I was world building, and I did not have a tool to do it properly. So Demetrius made one for me. That was world anvil. And we are both absolutely in love with science fiction

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: your favorite sci-fi. Probably a lot. But Firefly expands the books June and kind of

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: horror, sci-fi as well. So yeah, basically, we run the whole gamma of loving sci-fi. And that's really what we're gonna talk about today is the whole breadth of approaching sci-fi in the different sci-fi stuff.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Just a note about what is. Well, landlord, because we've mentioned it several times, and I feel like at this point in the presentation people will be sitting there going. What the hell is this thing? Well, landlord, is our well building software. It's also a novel writing software. You can use it to start a world input and track a world you already have. You can write a novel that is integrated to your world because the novel writing software is integrated there.

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It's a massive creative community of at this point over 2 million people, 1 million world builders of all sorts of different types.

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So

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: everybody, everybody there is is there to worldwide and enjoy the space we do a lot of community activities as well. If you want to hear more about world ample, you can, of course, ask questions here. We will answer them. We're not mean.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: But we are doing a whole presentation tomorrow at 7 Pm. Uk. Time, 2 pm. Eastern time about specifically using well out of the science fiction. So if you are curious, do come along. We're gonna be showcasing the full gamut of the tools, and how you can use them as well as how a bunch of our users. But this is not a marketing tool. This is a talk about well building, because we love well building. So

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: I think so to move on today, we're gonna cover how to create new worlds, planets, stars, locations in space. And some of the things you can consider some of the options you have.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: We're gonna talk about alien species shaped by those worlds. And then we're gonna talk about diverse cultures that might grow up amongst those species.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Why, we're here. We're here to create intriguing settings. That's what world building is all about. Settings with that are rich with conflicts that are rich with storytelling opportunities to make our readers fall in love, to let them escape, to let them consider human stories and human problems with nonhuman characters. This is what sci-fi has been useful since the beginning to hold a lens up to our societies

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: and to explore those in a way that doesn't feel too personal to extrapolate. Take one degree of separation. So we could look at these these issues and also to have fun. Because, do you know what science fiction is also really fun. So these are the kinds of aims that we have when we are creating our settings. And it's always good when you're gonna start big project like building a whole world setting or a whole galaxy in our case, to think about why we're doing it. So

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: that's really our approaches when we're building science fantasy. What's science fiction world? I did see that there is a quest to see the slides. We will be sharing slides at the end of this presentation, so don't feel like you have to make thousands and thousands of notes. We will share that slide deck so you will be able to download it and have it for keeps.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: This is the science bit that I promised astrophysics one. One, consider this a super quick crash course, just to lay down some big basics of astrogeography.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: We're going to start with. Stars. Stars

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: are formative for the planetary systems that they host. They affect the geography. They affect the species. They affect the cultures of those planets as well. So starting with your star can be super super useful as a basis point, as a kicking off point for building a planetary system, and the species and cultures that follow

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: important things to remember. Stars can be non planet hosting. There are very many of those space is very empty. There are lots of stars with nothing Orpheus

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: stars can be the center of a planetary system. So, like our solar system, one sun, whole bunch of planets, and other bits and bulbs which we'll talk about later. Very science here. And of course, stars can be part of a star system, a number of stars that orbit each other. You may have heard the term binary systemary system. These are star systems, and they may also host

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planetary systems one or several.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: There's a lot of possibilities there.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Very basic

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Stella classification. The the sort of array of star types have obf. Gkm, if you want to remember that ob good, funny girl, slash Guy, kiss me.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: That's the pneumonic there. And it's actually this is

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: the sorry, the the gamet from hot to cold. These are then subdivided internally from 0 to 9, so you could have an O 0! That would be the hottest possible star or an M. 9.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: It does get more complicated. There are more things there, but this is a very good jumping off point to consider stuff. And again, if you are somebody who's doing hard Sci-fi, Google, the Morgan Keenan system and go have a read. That is a very good start for your research. Yeah. And as a reference point, Alison is a so it's towards the colder end, and it's towards the hotter end of that category.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: This again I told you I'll give you the slides, so you'll be able to reference this in detail. This is a very quick cheat sheet of the color of the star, the temperature range. And, most importantly, the prevalence. How common is this star type? That is a very useful thing when you're kicking off with a with building kind of areas of space to know how common is this all that kind of star? Should you have only 10-type? Or should you have a million home types? Well.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: if you read this, probably only one. And again, as an example size, you can go and have a look at them and a poke and a read if you want to. Again. if you wanna research, this is your jumping off point. If you're doing very soft sci-fi. This could be all you need in terms of information.

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And again, for your later perusal. This is the hits from Russell diagram, which is a typical diagram of

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: kind of ha! How the stars kinda line up towards each other on the left hand side is absolute magnitude. That is basically the brightness of your star. So that's gonna help. You understand how bright audiences start appears quick! Carry out the lower the number.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: the brighter the object. So those hypergiants at the top are the brightest objects at minus 10, and the brown dwarfs at the bottom right? Those are the dimmest objects at plus 20. So when you're understanding these when you're looking at this app, that's that's your coordination especially. That's how you're that's how you're understanding hybrid exactly

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: again. Lots of times to go and have a look at. I cannot possibly unpack all of this and speak about everything else. But this is a good place to start somebody's written solar analog. That would be a line here. This is the main sequence that's actually the most common stars. And we are kind of like on the G and

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: gonna go. Huh?

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Generally speaking, within about stars, most of the times would be right. And there will be dwarfs. So that's about 76%. I think of the start. So yeah, most of the stuff will be in that.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: This is a very quick cheat sheet for those of you who want to make stellar systems. So that's clusters of stars working together.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis:  smaller and lighter stars, or bit bigger and heavier ones. That, by the way is a is a universal constant. If it's smaller and lighter. If it's lower in mass, it's gonna orbit something that is bigger and heavier that goes for stars and black holes and planets and moons and space ice and everything else.

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Balance systems are usually hierarchical. I will break that down

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: small. The stars in a system can be divided into 2 smaller groups, each of which traverses a larger orbit. So essentially.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: everything will break into equal sized chunks that will be hierarchical and balanced, and on the right hand side of the slide you can see the different ways that they theoretically will break down, depending on the mass of the stuff. Again.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: stars of high multiplicity. David S. Evans, if you want to research this, that's the place you can go. It is a very, very good. Very detailed piece of work there.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: and if you just wanna make a soft system based on this, you could do that, too, in terms of Science Fiction. If you have a robot firefly fireplace every good example of the multi Star system and is actually an exquisite way to write science fiction if you're writing, but for pre faster than light speeds, because that would give you a lot of planets to play around, and a lot of interesting orbits have come closer and further away from each other as this. The sun's

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: each other, and we create a very powerful, a very intricate system, without giving to deal with business, you know, fdl, or actually space on dilation, which is always a mess and difficult to tackle unless one drive

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: the final thing. If your system is unbalanced, it can shoot stuff, shut stars off into space, just saying that that's the thing that happened. Then there was one. Yes, exactly.

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So that was literally fastest. Bus stop taught possible of

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: astrogeology. Let's talk about plants.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: We already know that planets are non stellar objects. They orbit a star or a star system

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: usually talk about real planets in a minute. They are formed from pro protoplanetary discs. That is a hell of a word protoplanetary discs. So when a new star is formed, basically, it has a disk all the way around it of

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: dust and crap and gas, then behavior things and helium and hydrogen, or essentially the the lightest elements that form the the actual star tend to actually circle around it because of centrifugal forces. And slowly, with time, they get colder. And they got actually mass together, because, you know, things subtract each other kind of thing in space so slowly become mass, and the mass becomes spherical, because, you know.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: rudimentary

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: planetary systems contain planets.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: satellites and moves. And these kinds of things which are big planets and planetissimals, which are little, tiny minute planets which might not be considered planets

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: like Pluto. Like Pluto, poor Pluto Press, F. For Pluto, poor Pluto

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circumsteller discs like the oort cloud, the caliper belt, the asteroid belt.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: these are essentially belts out in space that are formed on, for example, asteroids like the asteroid belt. The old cloud is a giant gas cloud, essentially and then you get asteroids and comments. These are all things you would find in a planetary system. You do not normally find things like nebulous within a planetary system, although you can. That is relatively unusual.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: But you can find star system. So the reason you cannot find star systems very often in nebulous is because forties of stars, because that's where the stars are coming from, and they are too early in their generation and builder to actually hit planets. It's not impossible. And they have been observed. But it's extremely rare. Yeah. So if you are writing about nebulous inside planetary systems, be aware that you are in

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case you're writing about an edge case and your scientist will go. This is unusual. Just so that you're aware of kind of the the space there.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Kinds of plants, as far as we know. And again.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: this is where it gets to be, you know. Keep reading the NASA updates. There are 4 basic kinds of planets. There's your gas giant that's like Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system is the guest planet, mainly gaseous, Helium. It does not have a rocky surface. You will not be walking around on Jupiter. Funny enough. Yes, NASA, about 3 weeks ago, made an announcement about Jupiter. But there is actually good chance in Jupiter. Well, holy Moly, that's what we mean about keep keep reading the NASA update. Yes.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Neptune planets. Again, many of these are named after the planets in our solar system, because these are the ones that we know and can observe more easily. So these are the things around the size of Neptune or or Uranus. They are typically a core of rock with hydrogen, helium atmospheres, and they're also slightly smaller versions, but they are still significantly bigger than the super.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: There is no super earth in our solar system. We have regular earth, which is a terrestrial plan. Yes, exactly. Super. Us are essentially

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: big rocky planets, we think a smaller than Neptune but bigger than us, like 3, 2, 10 per

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: size categories essentially and, as far as we know. that could be waterworld snowball planets like Hoff, for example, any of you as a Star wars fan. These are probably where you're gonna get a wide variety of different surface types possible.

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And then that's the terrestrial part. So the first 4 planets in our solar system are terrestrial.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: These are small, smaller, obviously in astronomical scale, right? Small rocky planets that generally dominated by rock or iron, or both and they tend to have a solid or liquid surface

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: but also an active in most cases, core, which is absolutely so if we're talking about us like planets, you'll be choosing a terrestrial planet.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: if you are creating planetary systems as far as we are aware, let me say that, look today. The average planets install in the planetary system are 10

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: average. It could be as through as few as like 3, they can be as many as many. And again, this is up to you. But if you're creating many, many planetary systems, keep stopping myself in solar systems. If you're creating many planetary systems, 10 is the average. So you know where to kind of

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: fall on either side of that, to make things feel authentic, as far as we know. just to check out, clarify. Patrabis is saying, these are only planets. We're not actually talking planetoids, meteroids or asteroids. So which actually do you have a lot of things? Europa is a planetoid, because by definition it is actually a moon underneath the Jovian system.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Saturn. Essentially sorry. Jupiter. But there are a lot of actually other ways, you can actually handle that because planetoids are extremely interesting, especially planetoids, which are in orbit around bigger planets, because in most cases not all cases.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: count from the materials of the main world, or are attractive and then captured by the the actual world which people theorize that. Actually, that's how Jupiter got so many of the office but that actually creates for them a very specific design, because they're not created by the actual regional cloud. But they're actually either what we call a secondary products of the planet or captured, which means, actually, we have a common physics from those. So yeah.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: oh, can you go back? There's one important thing. If you are building life, which is what we're just about to talk about building. I'm going to keep saying this. As far as we know.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: the the habitable planets by life as we know it, ish. are those planets that have liquid walked water on their surface. That's what is currently considered by NASA to be a planet that may be able to sustain life.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: A planet in that zone from its star is called a planet in the Goldilocks Zone. That is the term that we're talking Goldilock. So again, if you wanna know more about this. That is your research term. Go off and read about that. If you're writing soft, sci fi, you could just say, Oh, it's in the Goldilocks zone, and keep on with your stuff.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: About half the stars, similar in temperature to our sun, remember, could have a rocky planet capable of supporting liquid water

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: on its surface as a 2020. So

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: if you're building a sun kind of like awesome. about half of those could have rocky planets like ours, terrestrial planets that are capable of supporting liquid water, which, as we've just discussed.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: is critical. We think, for supporting life. That does not mean that other types of stars cannot have a gold look so, but it will not be in the same distance from our sun. For example, our sounds called Luxon. I think it's from 0 point 7 to 1.7 au batastical unit, which is effectively because we're very human centric. The distance of the moon to from the air to sun. But

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: different star systems can have different Goldilocks depending on their velocity and surface temperature of the star, because you don't want to bend the crisp. Exactly so, depending on your sun brightness, which we just talked about depending on factors like your core temperature of your planet. Which would that just about to talk about when we talk about radiation?

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Your planet could be in a Goldilocks zone closer or further from the start.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: So this is, these are the things to think about when you are starting to create your your planetary systems, your own astrogeography, Bari Tanya. The answer is that there are about 7% of the stars that we have observed. Our excellent G stars. Yeah. G, 2. Stars specifically are, of course, a subset of 7%. But I think it's actually closer to 1% of the 7.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Generally speaking, pretty much the same thing.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Again, we will be giving you this so that you could use it for your I'm I'm I'm shooting off in space cluster.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Sorry about that. Okay, we've done this one. We've done this one.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: this one. So we've gone from big star clusters all of that stuff down to the possibilities of planetary systems. Now with focusing on an individual planet.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: What are the choices that will affect the surface conditions close to the star? The warmer the planet in general.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: one of the things that we think creates our warm center of our earth

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: is the radioactive bits inside it. So this can be a factor as well. It's not just some heat that comes in. It's heat that comes out as well. Exactly. But in general closer to the star, the warmer the plan. And also don't forget, for example, that Mercury is what we call lock planet, which actually is a concept of Mercury, is absolutely burning, while the other is in complete frost, because it's always in the darkness. So this can also play role

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: planets closer to the sun, also move faster through their orbit. So not only are there orbits, sometimes smaller, although you can see in the bottom right? It's perfectly possible for planet not to have a circular orbit, but to have an elliptical orbit they will move faster through that orbit

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: if they are closer to the sun, and that means they'll also probably move at different speeds in different parts of that elliptical orbit as well.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Fastest spin that's axillary spin on itself short a day spin also influences wind and cloud formation. If you're wondering about spin as far as

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Astronomers know right now, that is pretty much set in motion by the the formation of the plan. So the formation of the planet, how it falls, defines, how fast it's spinning that speed will define the duration of the day. The duration of year, of course, is defined by the time it takes to get all the way around the sun. And again, you've seen in the bottom right? That could be a completely circular orbit, or it can be a very squished egg, shaped elliptical orbit.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: so actually has to do with how is the how are the pools of the planet? If it does give actually a magnetic core essentially defined, and that will change a lot.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: How efficiently the speed of the planet affects its seasons, more planets.

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and that is a very nice thing you can actually play with, because changing the orbit of the planet or changing the the tilt of the planet will create interesting effects. Just keep in mind that the more

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: adverse and more to the edges the effects of these different seasons. Exactly the horses for life, because life needs some sort of balance to exist. If the changes are too radical and too quickly, life cannot exist easily, because it will never hit the chance to evolve

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: absolutely. The other thing that affects the seasons is again what's called orbital eccentricity. So this is those egg shaped, elliptical orbits. They create seasonal inequality. So one of the theories behind the physics of the game of thrones universe is that it has a strongly elliptical orbit, or it's got a weird axial tilt. And one of those things, possibly a combination of both of those things

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is the reason that you get really short. Winters sometimes are really long winters other times, and the extension can be actually changed by many things like, for example, you can hear what they call a separate planet, like we have Jupiter, which effectively draws planet, close them and then releases them back to the to the extent of the sun itself.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Okay, okay. Now, I'm gonna talk about the graph system. The graph system

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: is not taken from science. It is taken science fiction. Exactly so. This is a specifically super useful essentially cheat sheet a quick method, creating surface conditions on a planet. And considering how those surface conditions will affect what you're what you're creating.

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So it's particularly used by Rpg games, which is particularly where the matrix comes from. I'm more from the fiction side to meetress is more from the Rpg site.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: and it's it's gravity, radiation, atmosphere, pressure and heat.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: So gravity is determined by a planet size and mass. The denser it is, the higher the gravity, the bigger it is, the higher the gravity

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radiation we've already talked about. You can get cosmic radiation, that is from space, and that can be shielded by an atmosphere, not. And you can have native radioactive elements, too.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: As for atmosphere there's a lot of things to consider here, such as what the elements are in your atmosphere. How quickly your atmosphere is changing, accruing, escaping. And I'll be there which is

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: search for it because I don't wanna go

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: and heat. So there, there's a lot of different factors, surface temperature, variation, day and nights day, and seasonal variations. This is dependent on the distance to the sun. This is dependent on the orbit. This could be dependent on what's in the atmosphere, and how much it is or is not holding in heat, shielding from cosmic heat, reacting to cosmic rays to create heat. There's a lot of variation

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there. But essentially, that's the final thing that we're thinking about when we're thinking about

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: a planetary conditions because we want to tell stories. And that's what's really important for us.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Cool thanks. Yep.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: So habitable planets cheat sheet again like the graph system. This is a quick guide to just making a thing that will work. Yes, so particularly. Here is just a list of planets or planet types that come from fiction, not from science. In order to give the idea of what kind of habitat you can actually find. And these planets, all of them have specific and alternative, like essentially.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: let's say, effects and understanding something going from the dry planet, which is, gonna be like the the desert, the savannahs. I mean very frames desert planet.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: for example, the average temperature of the planet during the most amount of time during this

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: orbit, whatever this orbit is, is colder than what we understand in that kind of thing. That's the idea. And then we have actually the continental ocean and tropical plants which tend to be more wet, which actually means a more thick atmosphere. It means a more warm atmosphere in most cases, and all the way to the extreme of ocean. Of course, which actually means complete wet atmosphere, and completely wet, as apparent with non no surface, if not, if this must

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: very, very quickly, because again, you will get these slides at the end. There's a bunch of other

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: facial phenomena that are not necessarily inhabitable, but they could be rebel basis or pirate bases. They could have star basis orbiting them, because there's mining things going on there. These are. These are all things that you can include and then we've also included a bunch of planetary tropes, because these are useful things that are kind of a quick a quick thing that your

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: readers can look at. Go. Oh, okay, it's that. These are also ways to reassure your reader, which we like to do in fiction. Reassure your reader that yes, this is Sci-fi, and yes, I am using some of the tropes, and then, of course, subverting those tropes as well. So also always a thing that we fiction writes love to do is use a trope. And then so you might have a Gaia planet that turns out not to be so Eden like, after all, for example, and that would be a great way of introducing a trope and then subverting it.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: So we've presented these all for you here. I'm not gonna go with through each one, but you can have a reach, for we provided definitions for all of those, and many of them you will recognize from your favorite siphon.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Totally. Yeah.

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more props are creating planets. If you're sitting there thinking alright. I understand the basics, but I need more help.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: geographical features, climate and weather, ecosystems, localized phenomena resources. The reason we haven't gone fully into these prompts is because they are all on world anvil. Our geography, world building template is designed to create any kind of geography, including planets and stars and astral phenomena. So if you want more of those, you can go

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go onto well, ample. It's all available for free all of the templates available for free, and you can go check them out and find more prompts if you would like them. This is secret, let's not be seeing it right now, but in the back of Will. Tell me right now on the developers for a fun project. We are building actually

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: a star system generator. It's gonna be free for everyone to use when it's out. And if you are interested into having that. And that actually is based on the James Webb telescope. And the Hubble telescope data that we've got. So we'll create the algorithms based on that that actually generates star systems for you. It adds a little bit of fiction as well in some of those. But it's clearly separated and visually separated, sensitive for that even something like that. Make sure that you are part of the newsletter, called Danville.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Just so you get the news when it comes comes out because I will announce it there. Essentially. So you know, it's out and you're gonna use it essentially. Yeah.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: So some of you will be frosting at the mouth with research terms, to go and read more, to learn more, to create your hard Science fiction, as some of you will be sitting there going. Okay, I'm making a nice planet. What's next?

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: This is what's next.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Sci-fi, mega structures. Again, these are things that you can add. These are human created or created. kind of mega constructions, habitats, star bases, star cities, gateways particularly useful for faster than like travel. Gateways is the best way to save the ancient build this way for us. Travel amongst the stars. Although cannot actually travel ourselves just yet. It's a really good, sincerely plot line to use, and ancient alien, sentient gateways is like, maybe the first of the plot

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: tropes. Yeah, yes, absolutely. Again. There's a bunch of things here. You can go and search for. I recommend TV. Tropes is a great place to read about tropes. It's fantastic, and I'll give you loads of examples from books and movies and and everything else. If you wanna go and find examples of those things, too.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: We did have a quick question about when the stellar, the the the generator, will be oh, the the generator will be as part of goal. Danville. It will be a domain, and then called Danville. It will be announced in the Golden Newsletter you can actually subscribe when you subscribe to go Downville, hey? By the way, yes, culture orbitals also space scanners Skype.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: All of these factors. I did not add everything here because we would go there forever. But yes, there are many. Make a structures and you search for them. You will find plenty

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: again. If you want more props and mega structures, use the building or landmark while building template on World Annual. It is absolutely stuffed full of prompts to help you develop these in detail. And yeah, you can find out all about

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: alright.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Let's talk about people, even if they're not people. Chipped building aliens. These are the protagonists of our stories. They are the side characters, the main characters.

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This is

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: this is this, is this is the people stuff. This is the character stuff. Now, so are aliens come from somewhere. And I think that that's something that's super critical.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: We need to consider where they're coming from and what kind of intelligence we're talking about. So I have a quick cheat sheet for you here about sapiance versus sentient. This is something that people get really confused about. So non-sentient

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: are your plants, your microbes, your basic fungus. If if it's growing in your fridge, it's probably non set to you so these are species that cannot experience emotions. They cannot experience consciousness.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Then we get to sentient.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: sentient creatures can feel and perceive, they can think and experience emotions in a rudimentary way.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: This includes consciousness arguably.

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Most many animals are sentient.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: so my cat is sentient, he feels, and he he feels emotions, he experiences emotions, he is conscious, he mainly thinks about food, but he is sentient. There are some people that will also say that sentience also requires, and the ability to recognize your own self with a mirror test, for example. But you know that, actually, again, is part of the definition of how you want to define it absolutely.

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Then we get to sapient.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: sapient beings, have the capacity for intelligence, wisdom and logic. They can solve problems, learn and understand.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: My cat cannot do these things. I love him, but he's not that intelligent. This is so sapient is what's often called intelligent life in Star Trek. But it's important to separate these things into clear categories, because sentient creatures can solve simple problems. But I would not call them wise or logical.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: And these are the categories that we think of when we're talking about aliens.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Cool.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: That's life. What is life guys again, we're talking about sentience, sapiance and non sentience. But we're also talking about

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how life looks, for example.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: so long. And thanks for all the fish. Let's continue now. For example, you could have hydrocarbon or silicon or phosphorus based. Life forms that could look very, very different to ours. There is a theory that viruses evolved from crystals, and that they are, in fact, a crystalline based life form. Those of you who are familiar with Star trek and the crystalline entity. Yes, there is a reason. It looks like a giant virus. That is the inspiration there.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: The sulfur's bacteria and unders events that feed on sulfur tardigrades which can survive sorting anything. There are so many different kinds of life. So when you're telling your stories.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: you need to consider how strange is too strange!

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: And what kind of story do you want to tell? Do you want to tell a story where somebody opens their fridge and the mold that they thought was mold has gained sentience and started building a small culture.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Then you're looking at a different kind of life than 2 different species sitting down at a table hammering out a peace treaty. For example.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: the kind of story you want to tell is gonna define the kind of life you want to build for it. But let's not forget that life which are not even sent in can actually be the route, if not the most important part in your novel or your book, or your whatever this might be. Writing a good example is the expanse, for the proto molecule at least, does not seem to be sapient or even sent in for that fact

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: an extreme role in what actually is happening. Yeah, exactly. So these are the questions, do you want to have one of those stories again? I use Star Trek as a as a reference, because it's so well known where they go into a nebula, and then they realize that the little tiny single cell organisms are, in fact, intelligence.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Is that the kind of story you're trying to tell? Or are you trying to tell a story when different kinds of people are people and experience people problems? In which case you're going to need to build something that is strange, but maybe not too strange.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: And these, this is how this is how you can make those decisions essentially start with the kind of stories you want to tell and go from there.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Speaking of which humanoid and non humanoids I wanna talk a little bit about Star Trek again, because Star trek Star Wars. These these big franchises. They have been responsible for a lot of human shaped aliens. Yeah, we I mean Star Trek kind of like red condit by saying, actually all come from the same genetic material. Therefore we look very much alive. That's why we all have 2 arms and 2 legs

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: under human avian use to describe

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alien creatures in a comparative, in a, in a comparative environment, to things that we know. So, for example, say, for example, aquatic. Okay, that's a very generic call, but actually means pretty much a creature that lives in water like our fish, for example. Or, you see, avian is like bird looking creatures which can be

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: humanoids in terms of the fact that you know they have 2 legs to arms.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: just wings, and you know, links kind of thing. So, yeah, again, this is a place where you can start to look for inspiration. You can start to research, you can start to consider, and maybe you'll select or create something that's not on the list. That's awesome. The list is not everything in the world. The list is a jumping off point for your creativity. And the final thing I would say, here is, watch out for the tropes.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: There is a big movement in fantasy right now. To turn over some of the problematic stereotypes. Things like the anti-semitic stereotypes got in very early into fantasy. Things like goblins are basically an anti-semitic

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: problem. And then you get the Ferrangi, which are basically space goblins. So this is me waving a flag for do your due diligence. Don't accept other people's grap from the past. Create your own things, and don't fall into the trap of just kind of okay. They did it. So it's fine.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: that's all. I'm saying that at the end of the day you could do what you want to do. I am just saying this is something that happens. It doesn't need to happen to you.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Graph. Do you remember, I talked about graph, that's gravity, radiation, atmosphere, pressure and heat.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Now we're gonna talk about how that forms humans. So thank you. Aliens, yes, thank you. Gravity.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: This affects a lot of physical characteristics of your aliens. That's gonna be their size, their strength, how their circulation works, whether they can fly you or not, things like their ability to perceive gravity. If you have a species that has developed in space, there's no reason why necessarily they will be able to perceive gravity or even find it desirable. For example.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: aquatic versus land animal. So there is a reason that the blue whale is the biggest animal that ever existed on earth is because buoyancy salt of the water solves a lot of problems that gravity exerts on terrestrial creatures. So if you want to have absolutely enormous monsters.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: you can put them in water, or you can put them in something like water that will give them buoyancy and allow them to exist.

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And if you're creating single cell organisms, be aware that gravity imposes an ultimate size, limitation. So the lower the gravity, the bigger your single cell organisms could be.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: This is a fun one. We've talked about radiation, and where it comes from. We've talked about the fact that atmosphere can filter it out, but not always.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Native radiogenic isotopes can be sources of heat for your planet's interior. They are not always bad.

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if you're creating species that have grown up in radioactive environments. Again, consider what that means. First of all, consider which types of radiation, and remember that they may evolve faster, due to cell mutations, they may develop biological defenses. For example, we have melanin.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: That's the the brownness in our skin that protects us against UV radiation. That is the thing that we produce, and people who come from sub Saharan Africa produce more of it because they have more. Some right? So we do. As humans develop defenses already for radiation.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: There may be behavioral defenses like living underground.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: They may be able to perceive radiation or different types of radiation that we cannot. And they may be radio trophic, that is, they may receive energy from radiation that might eat in invert plans can be considered radio trophic because they actually have part of the nutrition coming from the sun's race. Therefore, radio trophic in many

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atmosphere.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: So

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: we've got I've put at the top. That's that's how our atmosphere is is put together.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: we humans use it to create energy in our mitochondria. That's why we breathe in, so that the oxygen can combine in the mitochondria to form atp, which is our base energy unit

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: plants also do that with the oxygen, but they also fix Co 2 directly into their structures.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: And then there's nitrogen fixes. These are bacteria and fungi, and they often have symbiotic relationships with plants as well, and they take atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into ammonia, bioavailable nitrates which they need in order to make proteins so these are 3 ways that things on our planet use the environment in order to be able to survive.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: They use it for energy, they use it for proteins, they use it to directly

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: build materials essentially in terms of taking in and interacting with that environment at the simplest. You have single celled organisms which don't have any way of breathing. They just kind of with the atmosphere. We have lungs. Humans, most terrestrial creatures do

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: things in the water have gills, and I would say gills are highly effective when you have a very dense atmosphere like water.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: and then insects have what's called spherical. These are essentially like little holes that go directly inside them. Yes, I know this sounds mad. That is how insects work. Exposed lank, protected by holes.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Yeah, it's it's like plumbing. They have direct plumbing to the outside world. And essentially, these spiracles cause a limitation because they're not super effective.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: So when the oxygen on our planet was higher, which it used to be. If you've ever been to a pre-start museum, you see, these absolutely gigantic insects. That's why, because sphericals are ineffective, but when the oxygen is higher, then they can get more oxygen with their inefficient.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Yeah. Another thing to consider about your atmosphere is, can you burn things? This is very important for technology and life in general? So being able to burn things requires an oxidizer oxygen works, fluorine and chlorine were almost too well. Just a heads up. So if you have a lot of fluorine and chlorine in your atmosphere, you'll burn your eyebrows off.

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If that is too much of an optimizer.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: a lightning strike could set your atmosphere on fire. So you do need to find a balance here. If you start talking about the fact that your atmosphere is 90% oxygen and people are carrying candles. Somebody reading a book is, gonna say, why isn't the why isn't Sky on fire? What is happening? Exactly. And again, that's one of those moments where you need to get the details correct, because somebody reading your book will notice. I'm not saying you have to, you know.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: to have a Phd. In physics to write sci-fi. But if you are mentioning details like this, they have to line up. And that's where the world building becomes important because it creates authenticity in your setting.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: I'm gonna go through this really quickly

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: on earth. If you go to a high altitude, the atmospheric pressure

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: becomes lower. What that means is that there are fewer molecules of the elements per meter cubed. This means it's harder to take in oxygen for humans.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: This is something to consider for your own creatures as well.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: You need to decide. Okay, where are they living? What's your atmospheric but pressure like, if they have a very thin atmosphere, you need to consider. Maybe they have 2 or 3 sets of loans, or they have different kinds of loans depending on the yeah, I'm sorry pressure if it changes, but also consider that atmosphere with different

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sorry. A plant with different atmosphere of higher pressure might have the effect that fish essentially experience in the water in the air, which actually means that the fish or

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a a a an avian sorry. An avian creature can only live in a specific height from 2 to 100 to 500 meters. They cannot go over around it because it will die, you know, in way, breath, or actually will accidentally die absolutely again. What you're creating here is you're forming your species in ways that make sense

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: for the planet you've created. So when people go to a planet, they will understand. The planet is like this. The species are like this because of the planet. And if you meet your species, not on that planet, you're gonna what you're essentially gonna end up with is really interesting species, really interesting aliens that make a lot of sense by themselves together, and you can look at them and say, I bet you come from this kind of planet. And that's kind of what we're going for. Essentially.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: let's talk quickly about keep, because most of you will know most of this stuff on cold worlds. Your aliens will have ways to keep themselves warm, like fur and feathers in a large volume on hot worlds. They will have ways to keep themselves cool, like skin flaps and sweats and shells. They may also develop behaviors like being nocturnal. Good idea when your planet's super hot during the day, or live in trees or burrow under the surface. They may also. And this is where we get to the interesting story section again.

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We keep coming back to these interesting storytelling opportunities. They may molt in seasons they may change color or hibernate. They may have a different diet at different times of year, or they may experience mating practices in certain temperatures or certain conditions.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: These are really interesting storytelling opportunities here. These are things that you can create great character moments with also heat. The type of life can also affect how long they're going to leave. Because if, for example, if they're cold, planted species working a very cold planet. They might live for 100 to here. Just extremely slow. Exactly.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Again, if you want more prompt for creating an alien species like anatomy, morphology, perception, and extra sensory capabilities. What do they eat? How do they reproduce? You can find all of those on the well handled species template that is dedicated specifically to all kinds of species. Bacteria, space whales click ons. What have you?

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How fast can you talk to me, Chris? Not very. We have more talk than we have time. Yes, I think we might have to cut this dog. But okay.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: can can we tell us if we have time? Can we actually continue going, or should we bypass this?

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: It's awesome.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: You can keep going if you need to.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: So at this point, if you've been following along, or if you've been following on afterwards, or you've been following along with the slides, you have some geography, some stellar geography, some planetary geography. You may have developed some physical, biological species. But we have not even talked about beyond the biology. So

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we should go quickly through the slide because we have more slides. Technology level is a great place to start when you're figuring out

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: who is your species and what is their culture? Take? Are they in the caveman stage are they in the Stone Age? Are they in the energy age? And they're teleporting everywhere and flying around at faster than mic travel. This is a really useful place to start when building your species. And of course, then the next question would be, where they are in the Colorado scale, like a type, one where

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: solution, like we are, for example, or type 2 or type 3. But those exactly which are highly advanced civilizations. Again, if you're curious about make building. Advanced civilizations do go and research the kadash of scale super super interesting stuff for

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: species more more advanced than we are. Currently we human to the point of understanding is certainly exactly

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: the branches of technology you might want to think about in any technological age, whether that's steampunk age or energy age. Biology. physics.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: engineering, and inflammatics. And if you go down these routes that will give you things like lasers and shields, it will give you genetics and bio weapons and projectiles and computing power. These will help you kind of understand where, where and what is being developed, and to cover your basis. I haven't added it in the

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: in the

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: slide deck. But we also have a technology template on world ample. If you want more prompts for developing technology, there are some very common tropes. If you want to differentiate cultures within a species or differentiate species between each other, so differentiating different groups, which is what branch of technology have they focused on

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: in Star Wars? The Caman Owens are the Clones in the Orville, the mocklands are the weapon experts in Star trek. The Romulans are the espionage experts. Exactly. These different groups are focused on different areas of technology, and that gives you a really good way to differentiate them both on a show. Don't tell from the outside, but also like in A, in a storytelling and plotting and technologies.

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abilities, way. In an agency way you can differentiate what different groups could do. And you can say, this one has an advantage here, and this one has an advantage there, and you get great storytelling opportunities

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: milestones again, if they are beyond where we are, what have they unlocked? What can they do now that maybe they couldn't do before? But even if you're creating necessarily what we call a farm future science fiction, which actually means, I have already

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: some of them already achieve those milestones. This becomes a very interesting point of contention, because, for example, you might have people who give dark matter manipulation, which means they can actually jump through ftl, for example, amazing businesses. Or they might have, for example, meta materials which make them necessarily extremely powerful when it comes to combat, and they can actually build massive structures like space elevators and things like that. Or they might need, for example, able to have things.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: It's like the answer novel. But the answer was an extreme idea that that because there is a different pathway during the whole universe of sayonic energy, you can have inside communications across anywhere. The very fact of communication in civilization is game changing. It changes everything. You wanna research ansible search ansible. Ursa Ursula Lagwin. And you will find the relevant piece of information that you know.

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And finally, this is this is actually something that came to me in a dream when I was dealing with this topic, which is my holy triangle of technology and magic.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: If you are introducing things of power, whether it's magical power or technological power, consider the following triangle.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: what can it do? What are its abilities? What does it cost

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: to do those things? Does it cost fuel, or blood, or souls of the damned? Or deuterium? Or you know what is, what is the cost? It might be fuel, it might be a spiritual cost.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: What are its limitations? What can it not do? These 3 things will stop your magic or your technology becoming overpowered at turning your setting over and stopping it. Working

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: power versus cost versus limitations. This is my holy triangle of things that do stuff in world building in a not so when, whenever you're creating new things, consider power, cost and limitations, those 3 things will help you create technologies that make sense feel real and that don't

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: overpower your setting in somewhere like, why didn't? Why don't they just teleport that, for example? Well, they don't have a cost, or they don't have the limitations. Or, for example, they have teleporting devices, but they rely on technology that can be affected by weather patterns exactly, or gamma rates. And currently, there are, these things are really useful when you're building so that you can create things that work and do not work as you need them to.

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It wouldn't be a sci-fi culture discussion if I did not talk about planet top hats. This is something that appears fairly early on in Sci-fi, which is the idea that the entire population of a single planet

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: has a single culture.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: expresses a single point of view on a subject. This is a planetary or species wide monoculture. This is the all Klingons love war. This is the all elves are snooty stuff.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: You can use this. but it's you can also provide more variants here. I was about to say, actually, that although he's very true and part of hats are not necessarily the most realistic of things. We can consider the fact and the theory that in order for a civilization to be able to achieve faster than like space travel, or actually to be able to reach for the stars.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: If we require for everybody to work together, which actually means that at some point in the history. Somehow they have managed to reconcile. At least the issues they have between each other, and even if they have different beliefs, they must be closer together, because they have worked together closer to us to do so.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Spoilers! All humanity came together.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: and then they broke down apart again, because they were not ready for it. They would just push there because of the requirement. And then, when things were come down, actually broke again.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: So that's planning to pass the idea that there's a single monoculture that species wide, everybody's part of the same culture. But you do not have to do that big, flashing letters here. Wouldn't it be more interesting if

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: within a single species you show different cultural groups. This is how humans work, for example, even humans in the future, even humans that work together would conceivably have different religions, different food cultures, different ways of approaching things. And that is not weird.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: So cultures can be formed and affected by external factors like climate, weather and resources. If you're curious, read about whole hot cultures versus cold cultures. A lot of interesting work has been done on this. Sociologically, in our own world. Consider things like biological factors.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: consider things like inherited history and origin. So, for example, the the Greek culture is a culture of many different inherited histories. The American culture is a culture of many different inherited histories, and how, in different parts of those countries inherited history is interpreted and used differently. That can be the same for your whole planet as well. That is not weird.

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And then internal factors, like

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: religion and politics. For example, in Germany. traditionally, historically, the north part of Germany, Germany was Protestant, and the south part of Germany was Catholic. They have different cultures, different religious cultures. And they have different social cultures.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: When you're making different cultures within the same species. consider that there will be biological truths like

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: being born, dying.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: procreating old age that will be interpreted and handled differently by different culture groups.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: How do I mourn the death of somebody passing? How do you mourn the death of somebody passing? These will be different. But we are the same species. That is a great touchstone for a cultural difference.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: There will be unifying factors that define the species to people not part of these groups, for example, all locklands lay eggs. That is a thing that mocklands do within the all them. By the way, all Vulcans experience Pond far. This is a thing that Vulcans experience. This is a unifying biological factor that people on the outside looking in will say, Oh, yes, you were Vulcan. You experience Pond far.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: and 2 Vulcans from different places will say Yes, but my people do it like this, and their people do it like that.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: That is the perfect example of a biological truth, but from the outside looks the same, and from the inside is celebrated or experienced in different way, or means a different.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: These are some cultural aspects that you can consider and don't wanna get too much in detail on this again world. Apple has a whole template to build cultures and see that on the next slide, I think.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Oh, Nope!

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So well done has a whole template full of prompts on, on creating cultures. So you can go and check that out for loads and loads of prompts that will help you create diverse cultures within a species.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Somebody asked about exposition and delivering information with cultures. There's a lot of different ways you could do that. Remember, show. Don't tell. So anything that has a show

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: part of it is gonna be something that's easier to convey and easier to slip into the narrative of your book. Yes, that's why I've written food food. There will be a scene where a bunch of people sit down and eat, and somebody will be eating gach, that is to say, cling on living worm food.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: That's a great thing. What everybody has in their packed lunch is a great way to show different cultures.

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religious ceremonies, and observances, particularly those involving clothing or involving community rituals. So, for example, being invited to somebody's wedding

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: is a religious ceremony, if you're a beta zoid that happens naked.

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 surprise, tolerances, taboos, intolerances, symbols, and misinterpretation of symbols. I think red means danger. Sorry, for China thinks red means lucky

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: if they press that button, we're all gonna explode. These are important things that can show the differences in culture, gestures, body languages. And again, use biology. Biology is a universal truth. Sleeping population, sickness. How do people respond when they birth? Do they stand up and we expect applause? Do they look very embarrassed? These are cultural behaviors are very easy to show. Don't tell, and they can expose deeper truths.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: This is the slide I was talking about before. There are more world building props. So somebody said, What do you mean by prompts? World building props? What are the naming traditions of your culture? How many names do they have. And when do they gain those names within their life? Spam?

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: That's a really interesting question for culture. Again a great show. Don't tell. Oh, no, now I've come back from my Hajj. You need to call me this instead.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: That's an example of a real world name change within a culture.

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All of these, again, are on world ample lots of things to think about, to create rich, diverse, wonderful, alien cultures

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it so at the end of this talk. I hope that you've learned a little bit more about the options for astrogeography and what those options can create in terms of planetary conditions, how those planetary conditions can be richly formative for your alien species, both the ones that grow in your fridge and the ones that create peace treaties with you, and how you can create cultures, diverse, rich, beautiful cultures, to tell deeper truths about the human experience through sci-fi.

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and also just have some fun cause. That's for those of you curious about. Well, then, we do have a little gift for you. Thank you for your your attention, and your wonderful questions, which we will get to in a moment. We've got a coupon code for you that if you want to use sci-fi writer, Pwa, that's pro writing a sci-fi writer, Pwa, you will be able to go and

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: get 50% off forever for any of our annual subscriptions over on world. Anvil go to well, ample.com to create an account, and then you can check out the pricing. If you are interested, it is for you. If you are not interested. That is absolutely fine. Just go and enjoy and create beautiful alien works. Yes, that's it.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: We have a lot of questions. Yes.

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so with.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: we do have quite a bit of questions. We have some time for a few I don't like. We'll be able to get through all them.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: I don't know if there were any that picture interest, or you want me to just pick a couple. We'll start with the first one. How do you execute the world building expositions for a sci-fi, now novel without ending up being info dumping.

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I have a whole lecture on this.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: an entire lecture about exposition for world building in a nutshell show. Don't tell your world building any critical information

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: should be put into the story in motion so as part of a plot point.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: or emotionally so as part of a character experience. So if they need, if they need to learn how to use a sonic screwdriver. either they should be. In the heat of the moment they are handed a sonic screwdriver, and they are told, use this thing, and they go. What the hell is the thing, and they say it's a song. Driver. Stick it in there. Now we know what a song screwdriver is and what it does

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: great. We have done that exposition, but we have done it through something that has happened in the plot, or we have done it through something that has created a character moment.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: preferably both, if you can. But either or make somebody feel something or make something happen, and you can get away with conveying a lot of information

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: sounds good. We had another one I've seen twice about. Can we add our type of technology levels

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: in there's not, I mean, there's not a drop down. But with there are many ways actually doing that. And you can definitely do that. Essentially the way I would a a do that in Gondw would be to create essentially a technology article that it talks about a specific breakthrough and then define that breakthrough as the breakthrough point for all technologies coming behind a timeline would be a good idea for technology 3 as well. If you want to

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to talk about the history of your report and how the technology level change. So you can actually define where you want what? Actually, you're doing there. Absolutely

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: awesome.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: How? Let's see how come you said, okay, kind of just said that, Yup, okay, how to create planet conditions. Starting from how the native aliens look like

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: retroactive. So if you want, if you want to create aliens that are furry and chippy and kind of maybe a little bit chubby and cute and tight like he looks, for example, he will definitely evolve. So my cold right? They are kind of chubby, they are fluffy, they they live in a place that gets cold

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: like, think about. Think of a tiny bear like a panda. Why do they? There is human. There's water. They need to actually be able to put away from their environment very easily, and also their hunters in many ways. So at some point, actually, they need to come, which actually to be robust, those creatures kind of thing. So if you need a thing.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: If you want this for your alien, for example, you want it to be able to breathe water and

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: then create a swamp environment for it, create an environment where it would flourish. Exactly. So you can retroactively build planets and locations and environments

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: from your aliens. You can even go one step further, you can say, I want the planet like this, because so I want aliens like this. Therefore my planet needs to be like this. Therefore this is the physics that supports, that. This is the kind of star I will need. This is how I do it. You can do it either way, but it is a logic chain. You can also say, I want an ice planet.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: A, how does physics support that? If that is important for your kind of storytelling. And B, what kind of things are gonna grow on my ice planet like Giant Hoff llamas, for example.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Excellent! I'm glad we survived.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: We is World Anvil available and app form? Or is it just on the Websiteville is a an application as in that. Sorry, it's not an application. It's a website. It can be loaded into your phones right? Your browser. It is not optimized for web, therefore mobile yet. Exactly. But it can be used. We have actually how much of users that you use it. I will strongly recommend that the website

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: can be seen much better on a computer. But you know, if you are in that situation. You know, you can actually put it this way. II write, this is my phone. I write on my phone sometimes on well, anvil. I prefer to write on my laptop, but it is a browser based software that works on any size of screen.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: Does it come with a built in map make maker function? No, no. We have a Mac interactive map

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: software, which actually means you can actually upload your maps. You create an increment, or wherever she wants to, can put things in them, you can organize them. You can link articles into them, or you can link another map. So you can actually do a map with them. Up with them up, for example, for us, would be a a part of our star system, or or essentially multiple star systems like, go into a star system like going to. We'll be talking more about this tomorrow.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Essentially, I can see a few questions about this well handle is like the Wikipedia for your world, the Google Maps for your world. Once you have uploaded your images and we have a lot of suggestions of where to find map making software that is great, or you can handle it on a piece of paper and upload it like that. If you want to. Whatever works for you. It is the ancestry.com of your world. It is timelines, it is

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whiteboards to brainstorm and plot. It is also a novel writing software. So somebody asked, Can I just use one apple writing? Yes, absolutely. You can. You can use it to track the journeys of your characters on a sketch map that my first map was made of Microsoft paint. It was super ugly, but it did what I needed to do, which was track, the the places that my characters were going so I could keep track of, like what?

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Where they were, who was close to what, and who was close to each other essentially. So you can use it.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: in in various different ways, depending on what you're creating. And yes, it works for sci-fi and fantasy and historical fiction. And whatever you're building that has a big, old rich setting that you need to keep track of, that's what it's for. Essentially, I think, that that's hopefully covered several questions there. But I feel like we didn't explain. Very well, baby does. So I wanted to do that

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: that was good cause. We had someone ask about like how to keep the story, Sci-fi, and not turn it into more fantasy or science fans. Okay, so one of the easiest way to actually define something. Science fiction enough. Science is always ask the question, what was before.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: So as long as you can create a line that connects where you are to the pass from where currently are into. That means that you have actually plausible understanding of what this is you don't just say, Oh, they actually fly. Ho! How did they get to fly? Or, for example, or they can teleport? Teleporting means actually a lot of things right. They can happen in multiple ways. As long as you establish the chain of events that brought them from

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: 2,003 to teleporting Van, you actually have some basis on that. And by establishing, I mean actually scientific elements that create plausible ideas of how this works. For example, you know, string theory, for example, or

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: the interactivity between molecules or whatever this might be, for example.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: So that is a trick there, make sure that you establish a chain, and that's how you can actually make sure that you stay on path.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: So yeah, I would. Star Trek is a great example of that. So Star Trek is a soft sci-fi setting. Sometimes it's referred to as science fantasy. I don't believe that is generally true, although it does put some put some toes in science absolutely but I would say in general, they create

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: reasons why something is happening. There is science talk even when the science talk is sometimes Star Trek jogging right to the point that I actually at some point I made a random generator for

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Star Trek jargon, because you can predict these things.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: and there is always an effort to make it sound like science. But the science is not incredibly sound. So I would describe a soft sci-fi, and that, honestly is is kind of the line science fantasy is when suddenly there's magic

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: in your sign science fiction. Or suddenly there are dragons, and they can pass through your ship, and nobody knows why. And it's never, generally speaking, also, consider something that's been science fiction as long as there is a request and inquiry for everything, this happening to be explained under scientific. So, for example, in a fundamental role, they will say, Oh, it's magic! In a sense these are psionic powers. There is somewhere.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: There's an established understanding under dimension, whatever this might mean, that people are able to hook into and use and manipulate in order to actually cause effect. So cause and effect, and the research and actually understanding is actually well.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: And then the other side of that, just to finish would be something like the Martian. The Martian is hard science fiction. Everything is explained in scientific terms. The problem he encounters has to be solved in scientific terms. Science is the answer to the core conflicts. The character is experiencing, and they are explained in scientific details, classic.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: hard sci-fi. But do not forget. Hard. Sci-fi is not about the technology. It's about the human condition. That is the focus. Always. It's how does technology affect us as humans know what technology you're not trying to actually give a scientific on how teleportation works. You're trying to tell a story of humans, of people. And there you know things that and the way that they can use technology as one way of solving a problem.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: Yes.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: I think that is a very good place to stop, because I'm sure we could keep going on working. Love it. Thank you so much for being guests.

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: and if you're sitting there, and your question hasn't been answered yet. We will be going. Live tomorrow. That's 7 Pm. Uk. Time, 2 pm. Eastern time, and we'll be talking about world anvil specifically and world apple for sci-fi. But if you wanna come in and ask your questions, we'll try and answer them. If they're about today's talk and who didn't get them answered. But the other thing is that if you go to twitch.tv forward, slash world.

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you will be able to follow as we go, live 2 or 3 times a week, talking about well building. We have interviews with experts about sci-fi and fantasy and well building, and we have expert writers come in and talk about writing novels and how to do that more effectively. We had an expert. So publishing come on recently. So there's a lot of resources there that we do share. And we love answering questions. So

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Janet Forbes & Dimitris Havlidis: twitch.tv forward, slash. Well, anvil, go and click the follow button. You'll be notified when we go live. And it's very much sessions like this. We answer questions. So we do go well, building. Basically.

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Chasity @ProWritingAid: it's a lot of fun. Thank you so much. And always behind the replays to the session in the hub, which I also just linked. And we will see you for your next session. Thank you so much.