dragonlady7 | Entries tagged with worldbuilding

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witchertrashbag https://witchertrashbag.tumblr.com/post/639821856589873152/just-realised-that-ive-never-seen-currency :

jackironsides https://jackironsides.tumblr.com/post/638939023737569280/just-realised-that-ive-never-seen-currency :

castillon02 https://castillon02.tumblr.com/post/638838336023363584/just-realised-that-ive-never-seen-currency :

jackironsides https://jackironsides.tumblr.com/post/638818051128803328:

Just realised that I’ve never seen currency exchange as a plot point in a Witcher fic, despite the fact that the wiki leads me to believe that pre-Nilfgaard invasion there were a lot of different currencies. And multiple currencies would make a lot more sense for the historical period which inspires The Witcher’s world building than Geralt being paid in ‘gold’ as a sort of fantasy euro.

Possibilities:

Geralt absolutely refuses to exchange currencies because he gets stiffed by the special “Witcher exchange rate” every time, and then he realizes he can just get Jaskier to do it. New favorite activities: 1) watching the asshole coin exchange person squirm when Jaskier puts on his Entitled Nobility Face, or 2) watching Jaskier make Totally Good Friends with the prejudiced local exchange person and seeing their gobsmacked expression when Jaskier hands Geralt all of the money afterward.

Geralt has to spring Jaskier or Lambert from jail, but the jail is only accepting local bribes and all Geralt has is currency from the bordering nations. The place isn’t big enough to have a currency exchange, so Geralt has to be like, “Let me just…go get paid by a local real quick” and find a contract. Meanwhile, Jaskier or Lambert (possibly: Jaskier AND Lambert, which adds to the ticking clock factor) is semi-successfully inciting an uprising of the peasantry against the local government.

Jaskier gets mugged by some bandits and successfully stalls for time by comically producing more and more esoteric forms of currency, having collected tips and wages from all over the Continent. Geralt rescues him while he’s in the middle of explaining the exchange rates to the bandits, with the coins helpfully sorted into different-sized piles to serve as visual aids.

EXACTLY

This is EXACTLY the sort of shit I meant!

Wait I have to add, Vesemir always slips them some extra coins when they leave the keep in the spring but it’s currency that hasn’t been used for like 400 years.

Lambert thinks the old man is just a little out of it but Eskel knows.

Vesemir is fucking with them. He wants the coins OUT. (Your picture was not posted)

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Oh, that’s a good question! and gah, Tumblr keeps glitching and losing my progress on this, so it won’t be as comprehensive as I want.

So anyway. I don’t really know, and I’m only an amateur historian and avid reader, and all this is fictional so everyone should do what they want, but all that said, I’m going to ramble on about what I think is possible or likely or just plain fun to imagine.

I don’t know if canon gives us much information on what the population was like, how many would be there at once, during the peak of operations of the… facility, for want of a better word. I have the impression that there’s a nearby-ish village that Vesemir has some kind of standing relationship with during his solo time there (but IDK if that impression is canon or fanon or what, I’m terrible at recollecting my sources); likely at its peak there was more of a population nearby, and possibly there could have been a fairly close relationship with that population– i.e., trading with the nearby civilians for supplies, and possibly having some crossover of population, maybe even people willing to do work at/for the keep. It wouldn’t have to be a self-sustaining compound, is my point there.

Which is good, because while having a kitchen garden kind of thing, to grow some of the more perishable stuff the population would want to eat– and the more specialty stuff, herbs and the like– would be feasible, but the thought of attempting to somehow have enough of a labor force to clear, maintain, and work large fields of land to directly support a mountainside castle seems prohibitive. The people who lived there were specialists, not laborers, so it makes a great deal more sense for them to buy in the large stores of grain and other supplies they would need to eat.

So, yes, I’d imagine they’d have things like a flock of chickens for meat and eggs, and some small amounts of livestock, and a few patches of vegetables and herbs, maybe a bit of orchard around, but it wouldn’t be enough to subsist on, only to supplement– and it would probably be largely focused on the specialty stuff, for distilling and making potions, that they’d prefer to directly produce so that it meets their particular specialty standards. So they’d likely buy in provisions, for the most part– which also, incidentally, could be a good way of explaining the Witchers’ canonical insistence on being paid in coin. If they produce nothing concrete to trade, then coin is important.

I think the logistics of having individual returning Witchers be collectively responsible for provisioning the keep is also difficult– if people don’t come back consistently every year, it’d be hard to work that out. Like… you could say if you come back bring enough provisions to keep yourself over the winter, but it almost makes more sense to just buy that in bulk, especially if there’s already a standing population. And there’d always be someone coming home injured or having been unable to provide well for themselves, and you’d just be at risk of not having good stocks of everything you needed and maybe having too much of some things and not enough of others. So probably, the Keep had a quartermaster, and probably, the Witchers who were on the Path would contribute financially, that just makes the most sense to me. (I mean, of course they’d also bring stuff they wanted, but that’s more like, the extras and luxuries and specialty stuff they prefer, rather than trying to haul home a barrel of flour or whatever.)

It just makes sense that when the Keep was populated, so was the surrounding area, and there’d’ve been regular supply runs managed by the full-time residents.

Of course, when there’s only the four of them left, you probably would figure on bringing provisions back with you individually to support yourself; it’s a lot less annoying, as the person in charge of cooking, to be dealing with four different sets of provisions than to be trying to scrape together food for 300 people out of 100 different people’s ideas of what to shop for.

IDK if that was what you were looking for, but that’s my thought! I bet there are some books out that would talk about the nuts and bolts of how a, say, medieval keep was provisioned, that would offer a lot more concrete inspiration– might be worth looking into institutions like abbeys as well. There’s a rich vein of inspiration there.

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continuing my pretending i know what i’m talking about,

(impromptu series here: 1) Worldbuilding Textures, 2) re: Worldbuilding Textures, and 3) Counterpoint: You Don’t Have To Research What You Don’t Want To)

I’ve been sort of mentally circling back to my first essay, where I talked about how great it was to already know stuff I was interested in so I could describe it in my writing.

So I thought I’d talk about that: it seems to me that the main point of fiction, really, is that it presents people with things that they can relate to, and can experience in their imaginations. I was making the point that you don’t have to force yourself to learn about stuff you don’t want to, you can find ways around it, but I didn’t mean for that to imply you just shouldn’t include stuff.

Not at all! Don’t be shy about describing things you’re passionate about! Of course you should research stuff you’re interested in, and put in at least some of the research you did, if you can possibly fit it into the story– and if it’s something you discover that you’d like to know about, absolutely seek out as many sources as possible and dive as deeply as you can manage into this thing that is interesting to you.

You have to balance it, as you have to balance all things– sometimes you wind up so sucked-into research that you never write the thing. And sometimes you wind up stuffing the first draft so full of gigantic dumps of the information you uncovered that the story itself gets completely lost.

But sometimes, in reading up on (or watching videos about, or talking to experts in, or however you learn about) the thing, you discover entire plot points and storylines you would not have thought of on your own, suggested by the very nature of the thing. You have farmers in your story, so you read up on how farming is done, and settle on what crops they must grow, and there you have the pacing of your events– something happens during planting, something else during tending, a third thing during the harvest, your timeline is all worked out. You learn about the realities and rhythms of the worlds of these different kinds of craftspeople, and realize that your nebulously thought-out storyline must wind through that structure, and suddenly you have a whole plot trellis!

It can go either way, and sometimes both ways at the same time, and you just have to try to balance. You’ve also got to be honest with yourself, and see where your disinterest is showing– writing about nomads with very little idea of how their pastoral system works is probably going to wind up showing off your ignorance, so maybe either suck it up and do some light research OR rejigger the plot so they’ve got a different reason to be traveling. You’ll learn, once you’ve got some practice and if you stay honest, the difference between “I am disinterested in this because it does not serve me” and “i am being lazy because I don’t know where to begin learning about this”– mind there’s no such thing as laziness, but it’s the easiest description. Laziness always has an underlying cause and you’ve got to find it to move past it.

There are no hard and fast rules about this, no secret formulas– or, if there are, I don’t know them– and you just have to use your judgement.

But. To sum up this impromptu and very drawn-out series– no, you don’t have to research things you’re not that interested in. There’s no requirements for specific topics to appear in your writing. But you ought to include the things you do love, because those very things are what people are going to wind up hooked by and drawn into your story. I have had so many responses from readers over the years who have Noticed that one detail I added in from experience, and have been so delighted by it, so drawn-in and included, and that one thing was what will stay with them– in some cases, for years.

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in terms of fanfic, having participated in a fencing club in university is the gift that keeps on giving, you would not believe how much fictional mileage I’ve gotten out of having a basic grounding in the rules of right-of-way from foil/sabre fencing, and like, understanding what the difference is between a parry and a disengage, and an attack and a riposte. you don’t even have to like, know what the different lines are (your fourth, your sixth, your fifth, god i had a terrible fifth for a sabreuse) or follow all the ridiculous FIE rule changes (IDEK what they’re doing with flicks now), just the basic 101 stuff will get you really far down the path of being able to credibly throw swordplay into your fiction.

i guess it’s only certain fandoms, but for real. you don’t need to know any of it, but it’s such an easy, like, filler thing, to just have a fencing match in there somewhere that your characters can discuss knowledgeably. or if you’ve got an action sequence, you don’t have to think through how it would work, you can just kind of think of a basic fencing match action and just describe it. lord! so useful.

there’s probably other stuff like that. horses. i was a horse girl. that’s been incredibly handy; just your baseline knowledge for worldbuilding that a horse is not a car and so does not have an off switch and so will poop and not wait where you ask it to and you’re going to have to collect it or have someone in charge of it if you’re too busy being the Plot.

and guns. actually i haven’t used guns much in writing. no that’s not true, i based an entire SGA epic off knowing how a gun works. but i have not yet used my understanding of flint-locks for anything.

sewing, definitely; historical fashion; being aware that your character in any premodern setting would be dressed in layers and none of them zipper or have underwires, and some idea of how they behave differently than modern clothing– it all tends to add richness to worldbuilding.

you know what i wish was more popular for authors/screenwriters? understanding how pre-electric lights worked. everybody just uses candles one hundred percent of the time regardless of social caste or situation. nobody ever ever has rushlights or fat or oil lamps. nobody has ever had to trim a wick. they just– light a candle, somehow, as if by, hmm, flipping a switch. [there are exceptions. every one of martha wells’s universes has detailed worldbuilding around what kind of lights they use, for example. she first hooked me when in the opening scene of the first book of hers i read, a character had to deal with a malfunctioning wheel-lock pistol. who even KNOWS what a wheel-lock is! there’s slow match muskets in that same work, too. amazing.]

None of these things are deal-breakers or -makers, and maybe they don’t matter that much to most people’s worldbuilding. Maybe it’s just that I find it satisfying to think of them. I really like consuming fiction that has those kinds of toothy worldbuilding textures in them, and I find it so satisfying to use them as frameworks for my own worldbuilding– just an awareness that the world the characters are in is different than mine and so the things I assume, like a lightswitch being next to a door, like a car being waiting for me, with gas stations at convenient intervals, like the way modern clothing stretches to fit you and is easy to launder, like the way I have a thermostat in my house that I only occasionally have to adjust– none of those would be there, and there’d be other things instead.

but man. in 1999 when my roommates were super into fencing and i thought the road trips sounded like fun, i never really knew how much goddamn mileage i would get out of that. it would probably have consoled me, given that i was the absolute worst fencer at basically every event, and yet my muscle memory of fencing lunges has fucked me up irrevocably for every goddamn aerobics class ever. (”Why is your back leg straight? What are you doing!” “uhhh a full extension?” “Stop doing that!” “I CAN’T” protip: they mean different things when they say ‘lunge’ and in aerobics, you don’t get to stab anyone in the throat.)