Project Gaia: The first stories

Despite our plans for last week, we again made something completely different. We've started exploring the lygean cultures more in depth, by writing a shorter story for each one of them.

The 7 lygean languages

In the beginning of the week, I wanted to start executing the invent-7-fantasy-langauges-plan, but then I pulled back, and pondered if this was really necessary. An invented language enriches a fantasy world, of course. So I checked out, what I'd actually have to do to make it right. I put this next to the benefit this would bring, and Abe and I decided that this wasn't worth it.

That doesn't mean we're going back to having all the peoples speak the same languages. We just dumped the inventing process waaaaay down. Each and every language of ours is based on already existing ones. We're inventing words and names as soon as we need them, and document everything in each culture's dictionary. So in reality we're just making a huge vocabulary list, and leave it at that.

© Abe Raham

Short stories

Instead we get to know our cultures better by writing a short story for each. These stories should tell about each aspect of the respective culture and will actually exist in the world. That means characters from the comic, game or whatever we want to do with Lygea, can quote from these stories.

On the other hand we created an opportunity to validate our invented cultures. So additionally they work as a proof of concept for everything we came up with so far, too.

© Abe Raham

Meet Whirlwind

While Abe is writing about the life of a teyan pilgrim, I started writing a story about the Rowagians, our bird-people. The rowagian people have forgotten their fun-loving ways, and became stiff. Whirlwind, a mother of 2 who likes to dance, will loosen up these structures and remind her people where they came from.

So I will spend the next days, maybe weeks, to create Whirlwinds story, everything included: Concept, writing, rewriting, feedback cycles, etc.

Storytelling

I find writing a few stories very useful. It gives me a chance to develop my own storytelling abilities, and I might use the things I'm learning for the Project Gaia game story, too. Besides the demand for describing the respective culture, I also want it to be easily readable and fun. Maybe we'll publish our stories when we're done. I will discuss this with Abe. Chances are high we'll only publish them in German first, though. Sorry!