How Do We Create

"A belief in magical creation is boring because it's a childish idea that requires no thinking. It's much more interesting to solve scientific problems instead of giving up and saying god-did-it."

Its not so much the belief that I'm defending, it's the process. A man said that the process is boring, yet this process works for Darwinists as well as for Christians. Lets take a look at how a Gamemaster puts together a fantasy world for gaming as an example.

The process of designing a new world begins somewhere. and logically, it begins with a thought. Everything begins with a thought. Just a simple little thought. In world design parlance, and as well as Marketing and Advertising, this is called the hook.

After the hook comes the process of building the world around that particular theme. Often the process demands study in several fields of science since most fantasy GMs build their world around a garden world. Although, in actuality, you don't need all of this, but it makes the world more interesting if you did study. Often, you can take a top down approach -- which is what I do, or a bottom up approach, which is safer to do.

Going bottom up: The bottom up approach is safer because you start with something small. Like a town nestled in a little valley with a dungeon a league away. However, as your world grows, it can grow organically and pretty much out of control as you go bigger. There is a possibility of hapzard design if you let it go out of control.

Going Bottom Down: I take the Top down method. I build the whole planet out of whole cloth. This requires more work. Let me say that again: it requires more work. Not only do I have to build the plan (or two suns), how many planets there are, whether there is a asteroid field, an Oort cloud or not, and other considerations. For a fantasy world, I choose a yellow G2 Sun with a luminosity of 1 and put in planets and then just go on my happy way turning my focus to building the planet.

Building the planet, I have to decide what world it is. In our solar system, there is several rocky worlds. There is a desert world (Mars), a Greenhouse world (Venus), a rocky ball (mercury), and a Garden world (Earth). I pick a planet type: Garden, and continue the work. To build the world to have any sort of reality, I have to study many different disciplines of science.

A Garden planet, with its index of DNA and abundant life, is the hardest planet to design for fantasy gaming. But most people do it anyhow. After the physical world is described, you have to populate with Life.

Life means plants, animals, and monsters (in fantasy gaming, we deal with monsters a lot). Plants and animals you know. Monsters are animals with enchanted (or genetically engineered) form. After that, you do intelligent beings. Intelligent beings require more work. After doing the Hard Science building the world, Intelligent Beings demand knowledge of soft science.

you have to describe their culture, their religion, their propensity for warfare, how they move, their history, their beliefs, how they see magic, and if they call it magic or not. You have to design mythology, creation myths and so forth. And decide if they are true or not. You have to describe prenatal rights, birthing rites, childhood rites, coming of age rites, marriage rites, and burial rites.

You have to make a lot of other choices in your design. And a lot of these things are taken care of during the game. And it is this precise process, that takes many manhours, that is declared -- BORING --.

How dare you try to evangelize to me without even taking into account what I said.