the sound of Innistrad should be a blend of Prussian with dashes of Old Germanic, Dutch, and French.
French?
I'd prefer if they stopped using Europe as the basis for their stories and flavor. They can be a bit more invented and exploratory, go to central or souther Africa, or North America, or even Australia and Indochina, and develop some truly novel and unique stories against the expectations of the familiar. It's a trope that writers only write about that which they care about, and in this case, they only care about the Eurocentric way of American thinking. That the author is apparently from the Isles, this should come as no surprise. Defy your expectations!
They used to be groundbreaking with Mirage.
But yeah, I would love an oceanian-themed plane, just like what FFX tried =) It would be very Blue-centric but you have tropical forests for Green and Black and Volcanoes for Red. Can't really fit White in there yet.
This is a long, long post. I'm hiding it for the comfort of all but the interested. There are flavor ideas involved, which I have no care if anyone wants to use for their own purposes, sans attribution. This includes WotC guys.
Planes shouldn't be just about one small region on a continent, which is sadly what's been happening of late. That is, it's what happens on most of the "novel" planes: You can either have a single geographic region (an urban setting or desert) and call it "the plane," but as Doug Beyer once wrote, this has no set definition on the nature of the plane itself: it isolates a section of it. What about the rest? Ravnica is not just the City, it is the wilderness and the desolation where presumably the seas were "drained" (anyone familiar with the Creationist "hydrosphere" theory knows the improbability of what to do with so much water on a viable Earth-like world and where all that water goes, and thus the problems with inferring the absence on a world of is seas while maintaining a functional weather system -- a flat world has no weather anything like ours). Both Mirrodin and Zendikar are presumably spheres, while the issue with Alara was left deliberately to question, just to allow the concept of the "shards" to segregate the areas of what was once a (presumably) spherical world; the very question of dimensional shards, in the sense of Rabiah, is left open. But this is not the case with Innistrad, or in fact Rath, Mercadia, and a host of other worlds (including Kamigawa). Instead, these are isolated regions, and they must presume an isolated territory, small set of possible cultures, etc. This is ridiculously unreasonable. Innistrad is the "plane", we are told, yet it seems to have all the complex geography of Lorwyn, a "world" situated in a Valley surrounded by mountains out of which nothing could pass. These "planes" are essentially England, or Germany, or Prussia, or some such. They have no variability.
This is made all the more improbable by Grizzled Outcasts , which implies a varied latitudinal and racially diverse complex which should span a GLOBE, yet again the regions of Innistrad are restricted to smaller than a continent, described as Provinces as in 18th century north-central Europe. We are dealing with varied biomes suggestive of far greater than the world described, and the very way this is expressed in art and flavor is hideous. The sense is rather that the artists and flavorists are restricted by their Anglosaxon biases, the sense of the familiar (themselves) than the variability that could be possible.
I'd like to think in their world-building, the Creative team should start conceiving of the planar structures as a whole, as globes or not, and world build on a Zendikar-scale, not an Innistrad scale. This allows them to do several things:
1. It gives the ability to plausibly use an Earth-like world model for the sake of weather, racial diversity, skin color, or setting placement.
2. It erases the problems of using the structure of the night/day cycle, months with moons, or years with a revolution around a centralized sun (Mirrodin awesomely inverts this, as does Discworld); it makes tides possible; it allows earthquakes, a solution created by tectonics, and thusly also trenches, orogenic uplift and thus mountains, volcanism, and so forth.
3. It gives the ability to isolate a setting to a section of the world, and permit the ability to travel to uniquely diverse realms to evoke a sense of alienness about the single world, a feature done oddly with Alara.
4. It means it is easier to return to the world without having to encounter the principles involved in the first story, because you can be somewhere else. This was what was so great about Dominaria: It is a globe, with various continents like Jamuraa or Terisiare, places that can be visited when necessary (Mirage, Ice Age) and never tread on old design. It can allow multi-block arcs while varying the structural or cultural feel, allowing new creative elements. This latter permitted the world-spanning of Zendikar with continents bearing different cultures of different races, like the Kor or Elves, or groups of Vampires.
These are bonuses that only require a little extra time in conceiving of the world as a whole, instead of leaving the question open. Where and How and things like this become more plausible, not less.
It makes it possible, for example (and the reason this reply is to Toby's comments) to build a world based on a limited geography, or a single type of "land form", such as an ocean world. I can easily conceive of an ocean-world, where the different colors are represented:
White is allocated to the poles, where ice forms, providing a stark contrast to the ever-flowing world-sea. Only the change at the margins inflicts on it the sense of a lack of stability, but this itself is stable change; otherwise, the world is stark and barren, and enforces a group-cooperative to survive, either above or below the polar ice.
Blue is allocated to the free waters of the mid latitudes, where the storms rage or settle, as necessary, and creatures are more likely to move between sea-surface and wind, changing between one medium and the other, and allowing masters of wind and wave ("wizards") to harness the endless territory it has to offer. Group politics can be used to emphasize Blue's "collective" feel by creating competing groups of "wizards," different schools to specialize on wind, wave, or realms just beneath the surface.
Black would be relegated to the depths, where the domain of things long dead or unfathomable remain or lurk, creatures vast and un-glimpseable. It is, in fact, my favorite feel of a "deep" type of non-hideous non-zombie black. Black here is about secrets and things that have died, true, but also about un-glimpsed-of life and survival for any cost, a Green sense of adapting to survive.
Red would have access to the volcanically active regions, either below the sea or where volcanoes break out on the surface, providing ample red mana and a burn-tolerant, extremophile biome, but diverse because these places would span the globe, and save for the Blue or Black places, would have no access to other portions of the world, or even know of other Red "clans" of volcano-dwellers.
Green, in stark contrast to anywhere else, would live beneath the wave, or at its surface, around the island-free equator, in the world-spanning Kelp Forest (there, see what I did?) allowing any manner of oceanic life to find purchase as a predator-prey environment. In contrast to other planes, Green is not about the fatties so much as about the weenies, for kelp forests tend not to harbor very large predators, merely smaller ones, because they are hard to navigate for large creatures.
And it's that simple. The Great Designer Search 2 imagined a subterranean world and found a place for all things, something that helps when you look outside the box. I do not think that world building is very hard, especially when creating a diversity of cultures, and they've proven this, but they seem to stop at the things that allow them to create creatures with bizarre names, and never proceed on to creating the world as a whole. When revisiting, we end up in the same place, with the same sense of where we were before, unlike Dominaria, and I think there's a flaw in that way of thinking. It doesn't help that it makes so that the concept artists and such are simply used to thinking in their own ecology, their own race or experience. This is largely due to having to meet the expectations of (I'm sure) their largely white audience, but Magic has been about defying expectations; if it weren't, we'd all be playing Yu-Gi-Oh, and I absolutely hate that game.
It's great that you bring up Final Fantasy. The guys who develop those games spend YEARS designing them, including the back story and world structure, features such as mythology and culture, design of clothes and what not. They pull from the diversity of mythologies and folklore in the world and use it all. They evoke the sense of the familiar in this manner. (There are other aspects, but I've talked too much to go into the problems with the Japanese approach, but anyone who knows the racial/cultural flaws in anime and manga should know what I'm talking about.)
"Possibilities abound, too numerous to count."
"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)
"Ever since man first left his cave and met a stranger with a different language and a new way of looking at things, the human race has had a dream: to kill him, so we don't have to learn his language or his new way of looking at things." --- Zapp Brannigan (Beast With a Billion Backs)
"Krallen" is actually German for "Claws", so the the "Krallenhorde" (which is also a grammatically and idomatically perfect Name in German) means "Clawhorde" or "Horde of the Claw".
the sound of Innistrad should be a blend of Prussian with dashes of Old Germanic, Dutch, and French.
French?
I'd prefer if they stopped using Europe as the basis for their stories and flavor. They can be a bit more invented and exploratory, go to central or souther Africa, or North America, or even Australia and Indochina, and develop some truly novel and unique stories against the expectations of the familiar. It's a trope that writers only write about that which they care about, and in this case, they only care about the Eurocentric way of American thinking. That the author is apparently from the Isles, this should come as no surprise. Defy your expectations!
They used to be groundbreaking with Mirage.
But yeah, I would love an oceanian-themed plane, just like what FFX tried =) It would be very Blue-centric but you have tropical forests for Green and Black and Volcanoes for Red. Can't really fit White in there yet.
That would be awesome! And white could be some kind of sky city, with angels or something like that.
Phonemes are useful for this. Here are some good ones to keep in mind for flavor:
Religious names, especially demons or angels Dead languages k names th names (e.g., Yawgmoth) Mor/ (mors, Latin for death) Conquerors Nameless characters (or those with just adjectives or nouns)
For instance, Elesh Norn works because Elesh sounds Semitic, and the norns were the Norse goddesses of fate. Sheoldred works similarly because sheol is Hebrew for "abyss", and "dre[a]d". Yeah. Jin-Gitaxis sounds just like an evil genius, also djinn. Urabrask and Vorinclex, I don't know.
I like the German-sounding names. It does do funny things to translations, though. For example, Sturmgeist is a valid German name. It was, indeed, already in use, as the German word for Storm Spirit . That means the Sturmgeist , in German, is instead named Unwettergeist ("Bad Weather Spirit").
Also, the use of graf as grave throws me off. Graf is also a German word; it's a noble title, equivalent to count (e.g. Count Dracula is Graf Dracula).
