The Quick Questions About World Building Thread

Can anyone give me any moderately large US cities that are on islands? Not including Manhattan. Need a Closed Circle, but every time I search for this sort of thing I just get articles about rising sea levels.

Some towns in the American Virgin Islands may meet your criteria. I don't think the US does "city-islands" like some countries do.

Well, it doesn't have to be entirely on an island. New York is more than Manhattan, after all. It just has to be enough that everything off the island can be cut off and still provide a large urban area to play around in.

In a multi religion setting, what is the closest term for a clergy who perform duties like a Christian priest but for a polytheistic religion? They are not shamans because they don't perform rituals, but guide visitors how to do so.

edited 2nd Jan '17 4:03:10 AM by murazrai

...A priest?

Seriously, Christianity doesn't own the word "priest."

i know good and well there's other kinds of priest.

There's "mystagogue" and "hierophant" for the alternate names for priests. They come from ancient Greek mystery religions.

edited 14th Jan '17 11:15:30 AM by CenturyEye

Does anyone have any idea what international trade would be like following a resurgence of manors, in essence, the manorialism of medieval times but with full automation of industry?

• Would states trade anything besides agricultural and mineral goods and maybe circus troupes?
• Would trading finished goods still be economically feasible or desirable?

edited 14th Jan '17 9:03:29 PM by CenturyEye

What do you exactly mean with 'manorialism'? There were different ways to manage manors, in the different centuries. Some of them flourished in times of flourishing international trade, other are typical of closed economies when there was little trade even between nearby regions.

Briefly: during the early Middle Ages, in western Europe, the proprietors tried to get mainly working days from their peasants, because there was too little coinage and too little market economy to make rents in money and/or goods profitable. In the high Middle Ages, with the development of trade and of cities, peasants were asked more for money instead of work. In Eastern Europe, the development was the opposite: With the increase of trade with the West and of the demand for food in western cities, the proprietors began to forced the peasants to work in the overlord's fields.

Modern industry is not possible with the level of trade and of monetary exchange of early Middle Ages. So that kind of manoralism is not compatible with industry. The kind of household which you can find in Eastern Europe existed because they were agricultural lands which imported all the finished goods they needed from the more developed Western nations, in exchange for raw materials (a sort of colonial relation, in a certain way).

Actually I do not see many ways in which a manorial household can coexist with the kind of economic complexity needed to fuel modern industry; unless it is forced through juridical/political means, and not very efficient. The nearest real life example I can think of is the household system of France at the eve of the French Revolution, in which the landlords were a little more than rent's collectors. And even this system was such a hindrance for the further development of economy that it was wiped out during the Revolution.

Can you give any more details of the French household system before the French Revolution? And, things in the world I'm building are far from sane. The manors are a development after a thriving industrial period. In essence, the technology and infrastructure remains but the ownership and working patterns and ideas of safety have changed significantly.

As for the manors themselves, I was not imagining rural estates, more like a series of self-sufficient networks (either geographically compact and more like a company town than anything or far flung conglomerates) with single owners (or groups of owners) and seasonal laborers attached to the network. Manorialism was the nearest analogy I could think of.
Except it still doesn't help determine why any of the networks would interact with the outside world or if they'd need too. Particularly with industry in that world. I can't imagine who would have a comparative/trade advantage in what if robots design everything cheaply. Or if any of that would matter at all in context.

edited 15th Jan '17 10:32:18 AM by CenturyEye

If they are industrial networks, they absolutely have to interact with the outside world. First of all to get all the raw materials they need: unless they are really big unities (whole nations... HUGE nations), they cannot have everything they need. And they must sell something in exchange for these raw materials, which means that they need a market. Unless you are thinking of a way to replenish natural resources or to transform a material in another material at will... in this case there would be no historical example to parallel your world.

Of course, the networks you have in mind can work as political unities: companies which are run as independent states, with a central government which has little power to intervene. This kind of 'feudal' society can work also with an industrial basis, I think.

About the situation before the French Revolution: At that time, feudalism has become a condition in which the peasants were proprietors in all but name of the land they cultivated, but the 'official' owner was still the feudal landlord, which had the right to impose some taxes on the farmers. They could not sell the land or ask for a mortgage without the permit of the landlord, which means that they had to pay for this permit. They could not change the crops at will and so on. The landlords on the other side had huge extensions of land which were managed directly, or more often rented to some rich entrepreneur (who usually sub-rented it to landless farmers). But the landlords too were limited by the custom and by the old 'feudal' relations: they could not sell at will the land of their servants, or remove an inefficient farmer to give the farm to someone else or to run it directly.

Works for me. Thank you greatly.

Is there any resource for authors who want to make a fictional country, but set in the real-world?

Wikipedia? It has helped me in such a venture.

I'll keep looking. I just need some resources for a map of the continental regions so's I can draw in some fictional landmass.

For that you can just google "blank physical map" and draw it in with "Fotografix Portable" (it's free) if you don't have an art program already. It'll be far from a professional job, especially if you use a mouse like I do, but it'll give you a visualization.

Cheers. I'll look into that.

Doing further world building with a Middle Eastern country as a peninsula with some big islands connected by highways like how Bahrain is connected to Saudi Arabia.

Figuring a good name for it between Amal (Hope) and Aamir (Prosperity).

Might want to look at the history of your country. From that, you can easily pick a name. The setting I've constructed was named "the fiery islands" by the Romans who discovered it because it was a relatively hot place.

Thanks for the assist. I'll keep it in mind.

Whelp. Got another question in mind.

Can this thread apply for any fanfiction stuff?

Sure why not.

how would one organize kaiju into groups and rankings?

It depends on the variety of kaiju and what the people doing the classification consider important.

in layman 's terms, idk.

Joking aside, i guess threat level and origin/class.