Remember V is said F

some excerpts:

I couldn’t think of the word “specialized” , but instead of hitting the breaks to wrestle with a thesaurus for ten minutes, I put [specific, tailored to one situation] and went on. Then when I had time I could go back to my note, see what I’d wanted to get across, and remember the word.

He wore The Ring, and was completely unswayed by its power. Gandalf feared the influence of The Ring, to the point he would not carry it to Mordor.

I think Tom Bombadil may actually be Aulë, under an assumed name. Though it may not fit exactly. Though it does make sense that Mairon’s ring didn’t corrupt him, he taught him everything he knows.

He may have “fallen for” Yavanna, and possibly ran away with her to Middle Earth (conjecture, at best) causing him to take on the person of Tom Bombadil.

Shout out to those of you who wonder out loud on the internet. (And then come home from work in the evening to a bajillion notes from people with takes you hadn’t even considered on a topic you haven’t even thought about since making a half-asleep text post ten hours ago before your first coffee of the day.) Shout out to you and only you. And to these folks who have had some thoughts worth thinking:

thank god for skin! without it we would simply be peeled limes with complicated emotions

@decaffeinated-hoe does not need caffeine to have thoughts or write them down on the internet. We’re truly blessed!

caligula was a pretty fucked up guy, but in his defense if everyone called me a nickname that meant “little boots” i’d also probably execute a few people

@thoodleoo serves delightfully acerbic hot takes on the ancient Romans.

I think women in ponds giving out swords is a fine system of governmence actually. May i have one

@swordlesbianopinions is fairly straightforward: Here is a lesbian who likes swords and wielding opinions, which she does freely and, might we add, rather well. Bravo!

‘how kafkaesque’ i say waiting in line at the taco bell. you think im talking about the alienating bureaucracy of waiting in a single file line for food premade in another state but actually im talking about the dead cockroach in the corner

@mariowiki​ likes sea creatures with lots of skin. She has been here forever and still manages to be funny, which is kind of impressive, honestly.

And here, to round us out, is an elephant seal in desperate need of a shower (if not a thought.)

Cities - go near water!  freshwater lakes and rivers (rivers especially) are the best places for cities because A) source of water and B) travel and trade is much easier cus you can put your boats like right there.  Basically ever relevant city ever was built on a lake or a river.

for rivers in general - because gravity, rivers run from mountains (forming from melting snow and ice (this is why they get fat in spring–more stuff melting)) to lakes/ocean where they can empty out (and even lakes will have rivers leading out that eventually get to the ocean), which can help when mapping out where those start and end.  rivers are also much thinner and faster in steeper elevations and very slow and wide when the land is flat

mountains - i like to think of what the tectonic plates look like because that’s what makes mountains!  mountains are also never standalone they’re always in mountain ranges (archipelagos are really just underwater mountain ranges babey).  a cool trick I like to do is occasionally separate mountain ranges across continents, because over time the tectonic plates shifted and literally split the range in half.  These mountains are really old tho so they’ve eroded and therefore it makes them smaller and rounder (like the appalachians) as opposed to relatively young mountain ranges like the rocky mountains which have taller and sharper peaks

Another mountain trick: if your mountains run along the ocean, the ocean side of the mountains will get a LOT of rain while the other side will be very dry–almost desert-like, in fact.  think of temperate rainforests in British Columbia vs the drier conditions in the canadian prairies

forests - depends on how warm the area might be.  coniferous forests are found further north (before you hit the tree line, and then it’s only tundra onwards) but as you head south you get leafier trees, and the leaves tend to get larger too

If you think about general elevation too, you’ll have places that might be swampy (wet + lower).  if your world has an ice age like we did, then glaciers may have carved the land, leaving piles of soil in the south that was left when the ice receded and places where the bedrock has been bared north of that (like the Canadian Shield in Canada–the reason we see that is because of the glaciers)

You might also have a land that’s dotted in a shitton of freshwater lakes as well because the meltwater filled the holes that the glaciers scraped out (this is why canada has so many goddamn lakes)

and if the ice age was more recent than it was in our world, then you might not even have the forest re-growth and it could be a lot of open plains

Though, for fantasy, you can make the world operate on entirely different principles:

With that done, the actual topic of city placement can be covered by videos like this:

Or

Once you have your places, if you want help naming them in realistic ways, this video can help:

This one is on architecture, which is definitely a subset of cities:

But for a more relevant practical guide on making settlements realistic:

Here’s a quick guide for making demographics:

Boromir, pointing at Legolas and Gimli: I definitely don’t know how either of your ages work

Boromir, pointing at Aragorn: I thought I knew how your age worked but apparently I was wrong

Boromir, pointing at Gandalf: I especially don’t know how your age works

The hobbits are the only ones given official ages in the text, and are between fifty or fifty-one and twenty-nine. Elves and dwarves notoriously age slowly, and Gimli is the offspring of one of Bilbo’s pals, so okay, we’ve established that he’s old enough to call the hobbits young, and Bilbo confirms for them that Aragorn is Pretty Old For A Bigjobs. Gandalf is, of course, eternal.

But we are never given any context for Boromir and Faramir’s ages, except that a) they are humans and, though Sons of Gondor, not much longer lived than most Bigjobs, and b) Faramir is A QuiteYoung Man. I was absolutely convinced, when I read the books as a youngun, that Boromir, being in ‘the flower of manhood’ iirc, was probably between 25 and 30.

And it would be Freaking Hilarious, okay, for Boromir to finally get around to actually asking how old this baby-faced hobbit carrying The Ring is, and get told ‘oh, he’s only fifty, but he’s very steady for his age.’

Boromir: ?!?!?!

And then Pippin and Merry start asking everyone how old they are because this is fascinating are we all official adults here except for Pippin or what.

Boromir: …. Pippin isn’t an adult HOW OLD IS PIPPIN.

Pippin is just 29, which is why everyone calls him Pippin, it’s gonna be at least another 20 years before he can make Peregrine work. Why, how old is Boromir?

Boromir, who would rather DIE than admit to being 28 right at this moment: …. 43. 

All the others, weighing up his apparent age compared to theirs: Sure, sounds legit.