Sep 20 2008
Impractical Applications, Week 13
When I first started creating species for my world, I took the idea rather literally, and invented a created species. Two, actually. Both were varieties of arthropod, and both were created mostly around their purpose.
Amusingly enough, what got me started on the little guys was an experiment in my molecular biology class. We’d been testing RNA interference in C. elegans, a tiny near-transparent nematode that looked like nothing more than a glass worm. And… well, leaving aside the problems with the experiment as it was, on Monday I showed up to count the worms and discovered that they were in—I kid you not—veins. Lines of worms, all piled up on top of each other so you couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began, and all wriggling constantly.
This gave me ideas. I took the design and made it bigger, because really, who’s going to be impressed or intimidated by microscopic worms? About six inches long, by the end. Then made them actual crystal worms, so anyone who saw a vein would also be hearing this dry scratching, scraping sound, and speciated them a bit, by giving them their own little veins of magical ore in different types, and creating their powers based on those types. Then I made them feed off of magic. And, in case it turned into a fight, gave them ways to team up with other worms (when your group is as powerful is mine is, you need to give your worms all the help they can get).
Their diet? Power. Their design purpose? The ability to detect the materials they have streaks of due to magical resonance. Their creator? A life-crafter with a bit of an arthropod obsession, name of Pemba—designing her to fit her creations was fun. And that in turn led me to her other creations—also magic-eaters, these hive-minded beetles were designed to create a sort of purified honey-analogue the way bees did. And had a couple other side effects, but…. well, my players read this blog, so I’ll have to be a little vague for now.
Purpose-first species design: You never know when it’s going to come in handy.
Hmmm, purpose first species design does only work if they were created as opposed to evoloution, etc. To illustrate the point, the babel fish.
Link doesn’t work. Try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel_fish.
I beg to differ.
As reference: Remember those hallucinogenic frogs I was talking about a couple days ago? Product of evolution. Now watch.
I start with this image: lick a frog for a vision quest. Purpose. Then I consider the frogs. They’re tree frogs; they almost have to be. Brightly colored, since poisonous frogs usually are; I’m thinking a splotch-pattern of a really vivid blue and a not-quite-blacklite purple. But they’re a hiding species, so I make them really small; one of these little charmers could fit on two outstretched fingers. (This has the added bonus of making them a bear to catch.) To add to the effect, and to fit with the overall thematics, I give them a really interesting sort of croak; it’s high-pitched, tends to waver a bit, and there’s more echo than there is actual sound, making it hard to locate one of the little guys by ear.
Then, just for the added detail, I decide what they taste like when licked. I’m thinking a bitter, milkweed taste; have you ever had a raw artichoke? It’s rather like that. Only with this little tang of something semi-sour….
…and now I need to figure out what the natural purpose of this set of traits is (imagine the kinds of courtship rituals these little guys would have!), but this comment is getting long enough as it is.
I agree with Erika on this one (re: purpose and evolution) mostly because of two distinctive reasons…
First (and correct me if I’m wrong) I always believed that evolutionary changes were due to certain mutations having higher possibilities of survival or higher amount of children that survived… and that this situation prolongs itself through time so that the new genetic code spreads around more, or that by some reason it becomes the predominant trait. If this was the case, it should not be hard to reverse engineer the conditions that made it so (if they become important.)
Second, and this does not just apply to evolution, I find that it’s much much better to work in that reverse order for pretty much everything. There is always a plausible explanation for everything, so the issue is to find one that is both persuasive and entertaining. For me this method has a lot of advantages, one of them being that you can freely think of any characteristic or mutation without being hindered by your own nagging voice that says “but that’s not possible!”
For further info, you can take a look at the Why Method
Fred