Substantial postings about constructed languages and constructed worlds in general. Good place to mention your own or evaluate someone else's. Put quick questions in C&C Quickies instead.
I was thinking today about the first conworld I ever made, which was called Cripto. I came up with this world when I was probably 6 or 7 years old, and worked on it for the subsequent 4 or 5 years. I have a firm memory of the map, which looked like this:
Those letters in the middle are islands in the ocean. Although it looks like a normal, spherical planet, it was actually a disc a few miles thick and probably around 250-300 miles across. Cripto rotated on its "axis" as it revolved around the sun, so it ended up looking like an endlessly-flipping coin. There were cities (Cripto City being the capital, of course) and the technology level was "modern", i.e., 1980s. I also made all kinds of sketches of the native population, which were aliens that looked like everyday objects on earth, except with arms, legs, and faces. For example, there were aliens that looked like shoes, and aliens that looked like toasters. I would periodically draw up issues of two different magazines that were published on Cripto, one of which featured pictures and biographies of various aliens, and the other which was news stories about current events on the planet.
I'm smiling nostalgically now. Does anyone else remember their earliest adventures in conworlding?
I love Cripto. I don't remember what my earliest conworld was. I was more into writing stories than creating the worlds.
The earliest one I can remember was on a planet.There were the "technological humans" that used the technology of the ancestors that first came to the planet. But their science had regressed, so though they could use radios and such, they couldn't understand them or reproduce them. Technology became a sort of relic, a reflection of their "God" in this world and aspiration to free themselves from "fleshly existence". Then there were other humans, probably stone age agriculture. But no one knows how they got there...
I got into conlanging in 5th grade, basically through wanting to create a micronation. It was called Qoqqoph /kA"kAf/. The language was called Qoqqkyuk /kA"xjVk/. I created a website for it... in fact, I think it still might be there... be right back...
I don't remember my first conworld. There was a time, in the early 1980s, when a cousin of mine and I produced about one new world every week. Of course, these worlds weren't well-elaborated (basically, just sketchy maps), and many elements were repeated from world to world. I don't know what happened to the stack of maps we produced; I hope they still exist somewhere, but each of us have searched the attic of their respective parents' house without success.
...brought to you by the Weeping Elf Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A
I've never made a conworld, but I did come up with a con-country when I was 8 or so. It was called Fjørdland (because fjord simply wasn't faux-Scandinavian enough), which was located somewhere between Iceland and Norway. Needless to say, it had a lot of fjords and towns with names that kinda sounded unconvincingly Scandinavian (actually more German than anything, because that was the one foreign language I had any familiarity with).
I drew a few maps, flags and a kit for the national soccer team. I think I might still have one of the later maps (from when I was 10, probably), which has a list of all the towns and geographic features on the back, with their coordinates. I remember deciding that I no longer liked the name of one of the towns, so I cut a small rectangle around it and pasted a blank sheet on the back of the map, so that I could rewrite the name.
Because my best friend at the time had a computer with a soccer game on it which allowed you to modify the teams, I made one for my country. You could even draw the flag (32×24 pixels, I think), which the game would then actually animate. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Of course, I had to come up with names for my players as well (which were generally a mix of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian names I happened to misremember, or just something that sounded convincing enough to us to pass as one). I actually continued creating a national team for pretty much every soccer game I've owned. Once I actually created an entire national league, complete with the clubs' logos, kits, flags, players (and their appearances, skills, etc...). Yes, I'm sure that took forever.
My best friend of course joined in on the fun (a little less zealously, of course) with his own con-country: West-Hungary. He never got much further than making a quick 5 minute map and a team with a flag for that first soccer game, but I do remember that the country was run by an eccentric and at times cruel dictator, whereas my own country was a haven of tranquility...
The flag, by the way, was your typical Nordic cross with a black background, a red cross with a blue line around it, and an even thinner white line around that. Here, I'll try my best using only special characters:
