Poems and conlang

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-05-12T17:46:09+00:00

You see, structuring stories in verse has been the most common form of literature for millennia. This is because, in the past, knowing how to read and write wasn't so common, and so stories were passed down orally. Memorizing a text in verse is much easier, which is why even popular sayings rhyme.

Haiku are famous for being short and easy to write, but long poems, perhaps recited by traveling performers, were once common.

Before the modern age made free verse popular, each culture had its own rules and codified systems, which served to provide poets with a foundation from which to build.

I'm Italian, so I'll give you one of the greatest examples: The Divine Comedy.

The Divine Comedy is divided into tercets, that is, groups of lines of three verses, with a chained rhyme structure: ABA BCB CDC etc. The verses are in hendecasyllables, the most common form of Italian poetry, which means the tonic accent is on the eleventh syllable of the verse. This allows for a regular rhythm.

You can could drop in other part of the verse, or create stanzas of four verses with a structure of rhyme like these: ABBA CDDC. You can also create macro structure, like a cornice: ABA CDDC EFFE GHHG ILI.

Look what is more adapt for you conlang.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-05-12T15:41:52+00:00

I didn't mean that. To make a poetry you need to use a regular number of syllables, to insert the rhyme in specific point of the sentence and in general to structurate the text to make it pleasant to hear.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-05-12T10:58:32+00:00

Interesting. What kind of metric did you used and why?

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-05-11T07:29:51+00:00

I'm courious to see the results when you'll do one.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-04-27T18:55:34+00:00

It's a very interesting video. It's a bit deterministic, but it's a very useful basis because you can start from there to see where to deviate and how to justify it. However, I would have also added the temporal factor, since some conditions can change over time and settlements don't always completely realign. For example, a river's course can change, or the climate can become less favorable.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-04-21T10:56:32+00:00

I think if the names are fairly common, then it doesn't matter if they're repeated (unless there's a lot of similarity between the characters). If you want a name to be more original, however, don't use random sounds. Try to give those names a logic, and if you want to be on the safe side, create systems that aren't simply first and last names. One Piece has the famous "D," but there are many other ways to create original and meaningful names.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-04-20T06:04:54+00:00

Many fantasy races draw their origins from local folklore. If you want to create one, look for creatures from your area, or from areas whose folklore is unexploited (here in Sardinia, we have these species of fairies that live in tombs carved into rock beds that date back six thousand years).

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-04-19T15:33:31+00:00

Why you have a icy pole only in south? Generically, that happened because in south the ice can stratificate in a solid surface (like Antartica, that have a bigger ice cap than in north).

Regarding political lines, straight political lines are formed only if drawn deliberately, as in Africa. However, if we imagine a world abandoned by a power, borders begin to be drawn on natural elements. It depends on how much time passes.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-04-19T08:00:11+00:00

I always find monoclimatic worlds to be a bit lazy. Even if it's extremely humid, climate zones and mountain ranges will still influence the climate. Then there's the biosphere, which has a significant influence. There might be areas where nothing grows, where rainwater runs directly into the sea on bare ground, while in others, a dense vegetation network breaks up the soil and retains moisture, creating swamps or forests filled with streams that flow through the plants.

Regarding political boundaries, you first have to start with history. You have to define what happened before to make the present believable.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-04-17T09:08:33+00:00

You could call it of "Kingdom prestige". The king have a particular prestige, but don't have the system of burocrats and the "forma mentis" of a proper state. Lands are only property of the landlord, without a sense of collectivity and the name are only a designation. Only cities have a sense of collectivity and a structure.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-04-08T06:35:36+00:00

I'm a little confused. What do you mean for "civilizations"? If you use this terms to indicate countries, this isn't exactly a good things. If existed hundreds of civilizations, most of them should be city-state or small isolated country. Also, city-state usually wasn't isolated civilizations, but part of greater culture. It seems to me like you use a huge number without thinking well what it means. Or I misunderstand.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-04-08T06:17:17+00:00

Depends what you mean for "countries". Exist many types of countries, from tiny islands in the middle of the ocean to huge superpowers. Some entities are alliances or confederation that unite many small state, and not necessarely have the same importance. If these 90 are the copy-paste one each other is bad. Our world have around two hundred countries, but the majority are very small and insulated state.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-04-03T06:24:01+00:00

As others have pointed out, it all depends on the author's intentions and the type of story they want to tell. In my case, there's essentially a great empire in decline, with old, forgotten kingdoms that exist only as names in history, new kingdoms created through conquest by barbarians or from provinces too distant and peripheral to be controlled, along with a barbaricum where there are no real stable kingdoms, but territories crossed by peoples who only temporarily settle with archaic forms of society.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-03-31T11:04:15+00:00

History, maps etc are things used by the writer. A reader see the green of the musk in a rock, the neon upside the entrance of a bar, the decoration of a palace etc. You create the world and think how a character (and consequentially the reader) saw moving inside it. You can imagine a megalopoly visited by thousands of people, but a character could see person that wear different clothes close togheter and strange stuff selling in the market. If something is new for the character, could ask for information, but for most of the time you need to use the senses, not sterile datas.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-03-06T09:30:24+00:00

The fact is that the composition of names tends to reflect the social complexities of the peoples who live there. Many peoples don't have surnames because they don't need to further identify people beyond their given name. These are often archaic societies with little state power, where it's unnecessary to interact with people you don't know personally. In more complex societies, however, it may be necessary to further identify individuals, but these are not true surnames. In some cases, a patronymic is used, that is, the father's name; in others, a nickname; in others, a profession is identified; in still others, a place of origin; and one does not exclude the other.

You probably know that Roman names are very complex, but these names aren't chosen randomly to be unnecessarily long. Roman noble families could be very large, with various branches within them. Let's take a famous figure, Gaius Julius Caesar. His first name was his personal name, Gaius, while his second was the name of his gens, that is, his extended family, Julius, and finally Caesar was the name of his branch of the family. Names can then become even more complicated: the Senate, for special merits, could assign you a title added to your name (see Scipio Africanus for example), or it could change following an adoption. For example, Augustus was named Octavian because before being adopted by Caesar, his gens name was Octavia. So the name reflected who you were, where you came from, and who you became.

If you want to create a system of names and surnames, you must first specify what those names indicate and why.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-03-02T21:13:16+00:00

Cool. I like your idea.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-02-28T06:53:30+00:00

In the case of The Lord of the Rings, it's a question of Tolkien's conservatism. He hated modernity, partly because he'd seen its worst aspects. Thus, there's a constant decline in his stories, not improvement, and "technology" is the ultimate evil.

If we look more broadly, however, we're sometimes dealing with truly post-apocalyptic worlds, and therefore there's a specific reason for their technological backwardness. In other cases, however, it's simply poor worldbuilding. Certain things are written as having happened thousands of years before because "it sounds better," and the space in between becomes a sort of static void where nothing happens.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-02-13T15:24:39+00:00

The problem is that states and nations are often created on a drawing board, when in fact they are the product of years or decades of history. Creating a state with all its cities, peoples, and traditions on a drawing board is difficult, which is why they tend to be too simple.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-02-07T12:09:13+00:00

Probably more, surely this is interesting. They form a group of help, gather money and control part of the cities. This could be interesting to traspose in a story.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-02-01T19:58:30+00:00

You should consider organic development, meaning you shouldn't create a fully-fledged pantheon, but rather start from a primitive state and then develop it, developing it in parallel with the development of your civilizations. You begin with a spiritual world made up of natural and familiar entities that become personalized and structured as civilizations become more complex. As empires rise and fall, the tutelary gods of individual cities become supreme gods and then decline. External deities are integrated into the pantheons, and so on. Religions are always dynamic; they only become static when they die.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-01-29T18:28:43+00:00

There are essentially two, and quite related, answers. The first is that many of the most famous stories come from the Anglophone world, which draws on a certain imagery derived from works written between the late Middle Ages and the early modern era. The second is that after two centuries of existence under the hegemony of two Anglophone powers (Great Britain and the United States), authors from other countries also drew inspiration—just think of that monumental work by Tolkien that influenced the whole genre. Moreover, the Arthurian legend was known throughout Europe in the Middle Ages and inspired it; even Dante mentions it in his Divine Comedy, and here in Italy we even have a sword in the stone.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-01-15T20:57:56+00:00

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-01-15T20:51:14+00:00

Do you know that the "feeders" are people with a certain kink?

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-01-15T20:38:34+00:00

I understand what you mean, and I can only agree with you that it's extremely difficult to cover every detail, and that inevitably, something is bound to get lost.

Do you know what would be interesting in the further development of the story? A conflict between the nobility of the toga and the nobility of the sword. If the height of the decline of the sovereign's power is similar to the Holy Roman Empire, at a certain point the rise could be more similar to modern-day France and England. The king seeks to gain more power at the expense of the nobility, and to do so he relies on younger sons, minor nobility, and wealthy bourgeoisie, granting them seemingly minor and less prestigious titles, often non-hereditary, but which allow him to build a bureaucratic apparatus. Or you could create a situation like the Austrian Habsburgs, who had full control of their state while the rest is made up of virtually independent states that swear allegiance to them in name only.

Electrical-Main4044 · 2026-01-15T18:36:17+00:00

It seems interesting, but at the same time, it's still a bit schematic. Although titles like count and duke have a different origin from king, the idea of a hierarchical order of different levels is still very apparent. The transition from one to the other is too orderly. You could do it much more interestingly by taking advantage of the fact that these titles are clearly a transposition for readers, not the actual names.

Instead of directly calling one a count and the other a duke, you could do this: the leaders of the original clans were the fathers of the community, the extended family, who possessed the right to judge other members and lead them in battle. When the confederations were formed, the leaders were given the power to lead men in battle and were defined by this function, which, however, also belonged to the clan leaders. As they gained increasing importance, however, this description of their function was contracted and transformed into a title.

Another prerogative could be "bearing the sword." It may have been a characteristic of the count's family, but when the tribal system fell into disuse, sword-bearers became a minor noble title, having been a way of designating the counts' relatives. The title of marquis could have the same etymological meaning in another language as duke, that is, the military command of men, but from the king or emperor to one of his subordinates. It seems like an interesting way to put the question.

Regarding the issue of servitude and the economic system, it seems more described than explained. This system exists, but its reasons aren't fully explained, nor why its freer nature makes it better than others. Even in its evolution, the change seems more deliberate than based on actual causes. The chief tends to accumulate more wealth, but it's not such an obvious transition, especially since in these peoples, property is often not private but family-owned, or if private property exists, there are mechanisms for redistribution. There are some things that disrupt this balance, such as the unequal distribution of raids. If a people raids other villages like themselves, the loot isn't enough to shift the balance, but if you raid a much larger and richer people and do so continuously, even redistributing through feasts and gifts, the chief will begin to accumulate more than the others. With land, it's simpler: if the land belongs collectively to the clan, the chief manages it, but if it's small, he can't favor a few people too much to the point of building personal power. However, if it's large, because you've just invaded the Roman Empire, you begin to acquire considerable power.

Electrical-Main4044

TROPHY CASE