Nature of a Planet

In art, be it painting, drawing, or world design, one of the core, fundamental rules is to start with big, broad, sweeping strokes, then to add finesse and fine detail after the fact. Without the arc of motion, the attempt to capture life on canvas falls flat, and without the nature of a world decided upon from the very beginning, the spark of life which makes it feel real will be nigh-impossible to capture.

As such, before one even begins to develop the culture, the language, the species that inhabit a world, first one must determine what the world itself is.

Is the audience treated to a lush utopia, adorned with a wondrous variety of life and colour, or does the very rock itself cry out in tortured anguish with the searing heat of the volcanic islands? A world beneath the oceans, captured in coral and oddities from the deepest depths of the abyssal plains, or a world forever shrouded in darkness, its star only the faint, dim reminder that there may have once been light long ago.

Even if we shrink the scale down, and you're designing not the entire planet, but only a microcosm such as city or town, there still must be a feel to it, a base concept, the broad stroke of the brush as mentioned above. The small, rural town where everyone knows each other's name, and life is a pleasant, simple, idyllic thing, rather than a dark and gritty inner city ridden with crime, hostility and mistrust, is an important thing to note before one even begins to get into the details.

While I discourage students, and in turn writers in general, from relying upon a single facet of their world, such as "jungle planet" or "ocean planet", as these are tacky, forced, and largely feel unbelievable, the fact of the matter is that there still is a trend towards a world having a particular feel to it, or at least large sections with key components contained within.

Take the example of the ocean planet: while the burgeoning writer may begin with "it's an ocean planet", this gives little in the way to work with for a storyteller, especially one unfamiliar with the oceanic forms of life and what hardships may be present.

Consider that the deepest trenches will contain a vastly different set of features to them as those which live near the surface, and the nature of the geological format of the planet itself must also be taken into consideration - is it actually a Terra-like world, such as with plate tectonics, undersea volcanic action, subduction and other geological forces, or is it a world akin to Europa, a moon with a frozen outer surface and liquid water beneath, heated by the tidal forces of a close orbit to such a large planet, similar to Triton's reverse orbit, which causes immense stress upon its form?

In the most advanced forms of world design, to build that world is to create not just a species on a planet identical to earth, but to truly explore the alien and to build up layer upon layer of intrigue surrounding the mechanics which lay beneath the final surface.

And so, we begin at the start: the star.

Assuming your world began with the start of our own universe, the first few generations of stars were incapable of supporting life as we can possibly know it. The universe existed only as hydrogen, and only through the atomic fusion process of stars could it be converted towards iron. Once iron was reached, these stars could no longer continue to support themselves, and many of these enormous supergiants became as hypernovae onto the night sky, lighting up entire galaxies with their death throes, and, in the process, supplying the heavier elements to the universe.

Each and everyone of us was born in the heart of a star, for we are comprised of more than just hydrogen alone.

Now, this assumes, of course, that your world belongs to the universe we are in, following the same rules and history up to a certain point. If your world was created by a divine being, there may be only that world and that world alone, without a star in the sky to behold. Perhaps the rules of physics are different for your universe, and perhaps a lot of things are true, but these are topics for another time and so we digress back to the star itself.

While there are many kinds of stars, the vast majority are simply incapable of supporting life. Too much radiation, too short a lifespan, too volatile, too hot for the gravity available, too dense, too cold, too small. The list of issues goes on and on, and we find ourselves primarily stranded with the use of a main sequence star, much like Sol itself.

This is not a bad thing, as a world can't be so alien the audience is unable to relate at all. Rather, a series of subtle, yet important differences are ideal, each one verifying that the reader, viewer or player is not simply on Terra itself under a different name, but a truly different world altogether.

As such, a single, standard star is a good starting place, though there are other options as well, such as a binary or trinary system, with multiple stars weaving a complex orbit around one another, though keep in mind that such greatly impacts the orbit of planets as well.

For the planet itself, the orbit is quite important as to the very nature of what the world will be like.

In one example of my own, the world Nocturne orbits its star with an exceptionally slow rotation; every year the planet rotates fully against the light but once, leaving half the planet in light, and half in dark, yet unlike a tidal-locked world, the light gradually creeps across the surface of the planet. In this case, life has been forced to adapt to the situation of a frozen, dead side of a planet which is always shifting, and the flora and fauna both have developed a variety of methods with which to survive such, from plants with an extended root system where the light-sensitive upper half transfers itself along essentially a rail system of these roots, to creatures which generate their own bioluminescent light by which to exist, storing large sums of energy during the daylight half of the year for use in the dark half.

In another example, Dichoterra exists as a moon following a figure-eight orbit around a pair of larger worlds, slingshotted back and forth from one to the other as they orbit their own star. The one world, Eirdras, projects a powerful electromagnetic field which draws Dichoterra within it's embrace, supplying energy for five days of a fourteen day cycle. In contrast, Maern projects what I've dubbed a mananetic field, wherein the electrons are charged with mana via the magical force rather than the elecromagnetic. In this case, the moon shifts back and forth between these two vastly different sources of energy, and the technology of the world has had to follow suit, sometimes finding compromise, and sometimes finding limited use effects.

For a third such example, one of my students created a pair of planets wherein they have an orbital resonance pattern where they line up every few orbits, coming remarkably close to one another. In this case, the planets can be seen remarkably near each other in the night sky, twice per year on the primary planet, which directly impacts the tides and has led to a vast religious belief system and culture surrounding the consistent event.

The point that is being made, is simply that the very orbit a world has greatly alters everything about that world in a cascading effect, and it's a consideration very few world designers ever even take into account.

Painting with broad strokes means exactly that - large, wide reaching impacts from a simple quirk of nature. Consider a world under intense global warming such as Venus, where the sun never shines yet the heat is searing. Could life begin in such a place? Quite likely, to be honest, it could, though not as we may understand it to be such.

When first building the world, the questions one must ask oneself are largely as follows:

- What is the end goal I'm trying to attain? - What unique characteristics do I want? - What timeline do I want? - What event A could cause outcome B?

Truly, the end goal is everything. If you begin by creating a chipper, beautiful world for a children's show, and find yourself with a brutal, unsympathetic, malicious world filled with death and hatred, then somewhere along the line, you should have noticed the error and reexamined what you were doing.

For unique characteristics, these are best decided upon early on as well. Will your world have magic? What about spiritual creatures and life beyond death? Should the world be tidal-locked with only daylight showing all day every day? Remember, such should not just be tacked on at the end, but rather developed from the ground up to explore what would truly make the world so unique with such. If the world has magic, then creatures will evolve to make use of that magic as part of their physiology, and the landscape itself may be involved as well.

The timeline of a world is important as well; in only the last one hundred years, what we thought we knew about the world has changed dramatically. We only even learned of plate tectonics about 50 years ago as of my writing of this. More than that, however, the timeline is important to discuss not just technology and knowledge, but how advanced the species of the world are. Perhaps you seek to create a timeline in the ancient past, where a modern crew of a starship land upon a world closer to a population of dinosaurs, or another set vastly into the distant future where our fundamental knowledge of the universe has drastically changed. These are important things to take into consideration.

More than anything, though, the purpose of world design is pre-production. This job entails setting up the basic foundations of what is later to come, and by this manner, the very nature of the work is that what the audience will always see is B, and we must plan out what cause A was that created the B in the first place. In a haphazardly thrown together world, B is built first, and A explains it after the fact, which tends to lead to plotholes, odd choices, and many times just leaves the design feeling lackluster. By deciding upon A first, then not only can B be pre-determined, but so can C and D and E. We can create an entire list of events and things which occur because of A, and work them all into the story so that it feels like a grand, unified whole, where everything plays off one another intentionally.

As such, these kinds of questions, and many others like them, must be asked of oneself if one is a world designer. By virtue of asking such, we learn that the world itself quickly comes alive, answering many of our questions for us in a logical manner.

The more effort which is placed into the early development of ideas, such as the picking of the orbit of a planet, the less effort is needed to come up with unique and interesting events to take place in the story later on.

To take my student's example of two worlds in close orbit to one another, we'll say that their passing becomes of religious significance, and due to the nature of such, the culture develops certain rituals to be performed upon that day, observances to be met, and tasks to be carried out. As such, we now have a framework upon which to base the entire culture, their history, their wars, their leaders and their daily lives. Each extra little step further fills in the blanks at a base level, and fill out more above it each time.

Cast in a different light, each decision made at the base conceptual level of the world branches off into many others. If a decision is made at the time of the story itself, it supports only itself, but if the decision is made hundreds, thousands, or millions of years before the story begins, then a wealth of narrative and history is created as well, so that the decision in the story itself is surrounded by many other related concepts, each strengthening what the audience sees.

In the end, however, even the most basic of ideas, from the amount of light a world receives, to the tilt of the axis, the days in a year, to the number of moons it may have, each and every one of these can have a lasting effect upon everything that follows.