Ugly Artwork: Will You be my Pocket?

A bit of art I did on a request. Nothing too special, but I thought I'd show it off.

You might recognize the medic on the right as the same as the Inequalizer. It's a request by the same person. For the uninitiated, in Team Fortress 2, a medic might choose to follow around one player in particular and continuously heal him or her. This patient is called a pocket.

World Building #11: Mapping It Out

I've decided that I want to place the setting on the Western Continent™. The sea at the bottom is very nice and gives the Selkies a way to touch almost every other piece of the continent. After some consideration, serious consideration, I decided I wanted to shrink the continent and move it under the equator. Having the setting encompass a continent the size of Eurasia feels a bit... off to me. The scale is too big.

I made my own version of the map, focusing on the western continent and making a few adjustments to the continent.

Lots of islands, flatten some mountain ranges and added others. I overlayed it with the outlines of the plates to give me an idea of where to put ranges. I may draw up climate zones later, but first I decided to draw some vague borders.


This map represents the political make up of the continent at the height of the Selkie Empire's influence. The dark grey, as you may have deduced, represents the selkies. The silvery gray are orcish lands. The blue is for elves, the brown is for the human kingdoms and the yellow is the Dwarven Empire.

At the time of the setting, Selkie territory has shrunk some as humans, elves, and orcs reclaim territory as the selkies wage civil war amongst themselves. The dwarven empire is now the dwarven republic.

The smallfolk are located on islands somewhere on the map. Most likely they'll be on the islands on the eastern gulf.

World Building #10: More Musings on Race

Some more thoughts on the various races.

Selkies

• Selkies by tradition are seals that can take human form. In this setting, they're humans who by the influence of Water magic transform into seals. What if that's not the only creature they can transform into? Perhaps with the proper amount of training or perhaps by region or perhaps by bloodline, some selkies can transform into other marine mammals. I'm going to be honest here: I'm partial to this idea because this means sea otter selkies. I find otters ridiculously adorable. Also, beware the orca selkie!
• Looking at the map, the best places to put the Selkie empire would be on either the long thin sea on the Western Continent or on the more rounded sea on the Eastern Continent. The Eastern Continent is a bit more appealing for its sea's obvious parallel to the Mediterranean, although that might be a reason to put it on the Western continent. Distancing oneself from the real world and whatnot.
  

Smallfolk

• Smallfolk, I've decided, live on an archipelago. A volcanic archipelago. The islands will likely be located in the sea that is dominated by the Selkies.
• Volcanic ash means that the smallfolk lands make for good farms. I can see these islands becoming a breadbasket. The Elves could be agricultural powerhouses with Wood magic, but agriculture is a perversion of the Wood. Dwarves too could be good farmers, since Earth has fertile connotations, but they're too distant to have that sort of impact. Of course, we'd need a fairly large island to support large farms, but we can deal with that later.
• And, of course, farmer smallfolk are probably different than the smallfolk that spend all their times in the main cities. Any thoughts on that?
  

Elves

• A friend of mine linked me to the Lorwyn elves of Magic the Gathering. These are elves that are obsessed with physical beauty to the point that their society revolves around it. A silly idea, perhaps, but I'm willing to make the elves look ridiculous. When I was reading up on them, I immediately thought "flowers". Flowers, after all, exist only to be physically beautiful to pollinating animals and the continuation of the plant species depends somewhat on those flowers being attractive. So, let's have a "Flower Tribe" that embraces physical beauty to the fullest extent, a bunch of pretty looking, flowery smelling, elves that do not bow down to ugly druid blood trees but who live out in a hierarchy based on being beautiful. Those with perfect looks are at the top, and those who are ugly, non-elves essentially and any elfs with deformations, are at the bottom and are nothing better than prey.
• I probably need to add a sympathetic elf division at some point. Probably.
  

Orcs

• Tribal nomad units of orcs don't work well for getting mining large deposits of metal to be forged into metal weapons and armor. Since metal is the scthick of orcs, they will probably need to be a few stable mining towns, villages, or even cities to provide the rest of the orcs with their metal needs. These orcs will be more merchant than warrior, focusing on the materialistic connotations of metal than the warlike ones.
  

Dwarves

• Dwarf women. Beards or no beards? Its a very important question! The universal answer I seem to get is "no beards" and, given that this isn't an entirely comedy setting, I suppose I must concur. As hilarious as Discworld dwarves are, unisex dwarves don't exactly fit the bill.
• What happened the the loyalist dwarves? Were they all hunted down by the Revolution or did they escape somewhere. It is possible that a remnant of the Dwarf Empire still exists with a Prince-Emperor in exile. Possibly in one of the nations they once conquered, a human nation. This allows for a human-dwarf mixed nation. How about a desert? Humans, a lower class, labor on the surface while the dwarves live in cool tunnels underneath.