February started with COVID and ended with a war. But we got some work done in between.
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by Jakub Wisz
While we’re finishing work on the full manuscript for Aphelion Toolkit, the Aurorae setting worldbuilding continues. We covered the rowing Temel in the last episode, and earlier we also talked about the Khradi and Triveni peoples – both articles mentioning the adversarial Nväldi people. So, in this episode we’ll talk about them in a bit more detail, answering some of your questions from previous blogs!
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by Jakub Wisz
Oh boy, has it been a while since the last blog about the world of Aurorae? Yeah, it’s been a few – here you can read about the mercenary Khradi, the mushroom-venerating Triveni, and the deadly and alien Vila.
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by Jakub Wisz
In the previous parts of the blog, I covered two of the seven major Kinships, the Khradi and the Triveni. In this one, I wanted to break away from the pattern before it emerges and bring your attention to another thing entirely – alien, mistborn creatures known as Vila. Their ways are as impenetrable to human minds as they themselves are to the human ships floating freely in the mists.
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by Jakub Wisz
In the previous part of the Aurorae dev blog I talked about the Khradi and their way of life around the frozen isles lost in the mists on the far orbit of the planetoid Maer. In this blog I’m gonna talk about the denizens of Maer, another major culture shaping the outlook on life in Aurorae – the Triveni, constantly dubbed The Mushroom People by Anna.
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By Jakub Wisz
It’s been a while since the previous Aurorae development blog – and so here we are. I think the best next step in bringing the game a bit closer to you will be through a series of articles describing the lore and rules of the game interchangeably. In this first one of the series, I’ll describe (mostly quoting the current Core Rule Book draft) one of the playable Kinships in the game – the adventurous sailors known throughout the void as the Khradi.
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I don’t always write blog posts, but when I do, I don’t know where to start. I’ll start at the beginning then – and I’m not one for long introductions. And so, welcome to the introductory blog post about Project Aphelion’s parallel upcoming game, Blazing Aurorae.
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by Jakub Wisz
It’s time to make some creatures!
With that lengthy and overly elaborate introduction, welcome to the third part of Blazing Aurorae’s worldbuilding blog. In previous blogs, I covered the conditions in the comet’s tail, as well as the spark of life itself. Today, I’m going to create the basis for all the future fantastic beings that will populate the mists’ vast emptiness.
There are many ways in which cellular life could adapt to exist and thrive in the void-like environment, and I think it’s not fair to choose one over the other – which is why we’ll have all of them.
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by Jakub Wisz
In the previous blog, I set up the conditions in the primordial world of Blazing Aurorae. It’s time to get some life going, baby. The conditions we have to start with are a bit difficult for life to arise.
To reiterate – aurorium dust creates fierce, magnetic storms throughout the comet’s tail, generating enough heat for liquid water and oxygen to exist in the form of mist suspended in a vacuum, dragged along with the comet.
For organic life as we know it, this is not a friendly environment – far from impossible, however. For extremophile bacteria and even some multicellular creatures on Earth, like tardigrades, this is just a normal Monday.
by Jakub Wisz
As a hard-scifi writer, I rarely get to venture out into the magical realms of fantasy. To make a long story short, I intend to change that. Consider this blog post an announcement of my next creation after Project Aphelion and Incitatus, Blazing Aurorae. It’s going to be a fantasy novel and maybe a tabletop RPG as well, set in a world very much unlike our own.
It’s going to be a tale set in the cold darkness of open space, in the tail of a comet full of life, civilizations, and wonders. Full of people living their lives on islands of rock and ice suspended in the icy clouds of the comet’s tail, loving, fighting, and exploring space on wooden ships thanks to the magic and technology of their ancestors.
The universe of Blazing Aurorae is far from your run-of-the-mill fantasy pot of tired old tropes and stories. It’s an unusual world with unusual creatures, but I want them to be intuitively understandable and relatable. There are magic elements and impossible conditions throughout; nonetheless, I aim to build it in accordance with known physics and biology. I believe it’s entirely possible to create a fantastic universe based on our real-world reality. In fact, I believe that a world created that way will be much more engaging, consistent, and original than a complete abstract based on nothing but desire to create something fantastic.
In this and the next blog posts, I’ll go through the process of building the setting step by step as I create the world.
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