Recent content by OutsidersEyes

That's a good point about population size. But for things like trying to make a large desert city work with steampunk-level engineering with magic crystals as a power source, it does get a little harder to google. It's also not quite medieval. In a lot of fantasy you could draw a rough...

Addition: The river could perhaps be underground and the city is built where it's accessible above ground. So the river is not visible from the view point of a traveler and the city is a sort of oasis. Past that, I think I could handwave it and move on to planning other cities.

After doing some further research, I've decided that about a 200 ft wide river and a city to one side only is the way to go, and without islands at all. Canals and underground pipes could provide water, especially with tech powered by the crystals. But as for the size of the city, it's a major...

I'm doing this world-first, not story-first. The worse serves as a setting for stories and also settings for paintings. But the writing is secondary to the building for me. Very nice point about the moat, too.

The city structure itself. Smaller islands could contain nothing, or smaller cafes at most. A larger island could be where the ruler(s) of the city lives among other ideas. It just helps determine the layout of the city. Then you have the logistics of maintaining several smaller bridges vs a...

There could be downfalls to one idea vs another that I'm not aware of, or advantages to smaller islands.

So I'm thinking that if the city is on both sides of the river, which would maximize the use of the river and its banks, islands with bridges would be useful. The river is based on the Nile and is potentially 1000ft wide, I haven't decided exactly. Here are three ways to handle the islands. 1, a...

I haven't really fleshed out the fae. They were just an ancient race that were more powerful than the elves, but got into the war with the dwarves and got wiped out afterwards be the elves. And if all of this happened long enough ago, even the elves might not clearly remember them.

Fae is almost a placeholder name for a race more powerful than the elves and dwarves. They don't necessarily look like traditional fae, they're just to elves what elves are to humans.

I've had to consider all of this lately. If the humans had built on top of the river and the elves live directly under that, they'd be perfectly on top of one another and the elves would be under the riverbed. But neither of them did that, that can't work. Or else I don't want to do it that way...

Another consideration. I said that the city is built on or at least very close to the underground elven city. And it's obviously close to the area where the elves mine crystal as the humans had planned to. I also said it's close to a river like the Nile, for a water source. But I haven't...

This is a really good idea. But the story is everywhere and nowhere. I'm building the world the write interconnected short stories in, but also just for the sake of building it. And I'm a watercolor painter. I also want to paint scenes and architecture in the world. So it's a source of material...

Some other things I've been thinking about because I obviously want to develop the world past the desert city, even though since elves and humans just happen to interact in the desert city alone, the other cities will either be purely elven or purely human. I want to avoid the stereotype of a...

This is all very realistic and I like it. The Dwarves were a smaller empire, so having strength in a single spot would have been easier for them, yes. And while the Dwarves and Elves were both outmatched by the Fae, the Dwarves developing their weapons to take on the Fae would have certainly...