I'm calling a halt of the A to Z blogging. Tendonitis or something like that, so no typing I can avoid, but I thought I'd make at least this short post.

Well, back to the worldbuilding notes. :D

Eodea has goblins among its humanoid species.

They have pointed ears, big noses, and projecting jaws with marked canines. Their hands have two thumbs, one on each side of the palm, and three non-thumb-fingers.

Their sexual dimorphism works out to male goblins being around 3-4 feet tall, and female goblins 5-6 feet. Women are also more long-lived, and rarer - I haven't settled on a number yet, but something in the ballpark of 5-10 males for each female in a population.

So they have a reason for a tendency to protect girls and woman. Also for polyandry. The longer lifespan is a factor for women being most of their leaders, lorekeepers, judges, scholars, etc.

Goblins in general, and male goblins in particular, tend to be very group-oriented. I'm sure there are humans who have interpreted an unwillingness to make important decisions alone as sign stupidity or cowardice.

There is an insular nation of goblins in the mountains of Raaji.

In Konda there are smaller goblin communities integrated into a society dominated by humans. Particularly in the capital they are known as expert craftsmen, usually by the name of their legacy-lines - small teams who work together and trace their training back through generations.

Yrn was a settlement founded by goblins; they still make up about a third of the population, the rest again being mostly humans.

In northern Akadan there's a culture whose makeup by species includes goblins along with orcs (majority), elves, and humans.

What is your personal mental image of goblins?

Does the world really need another high fantasy setting involving lots of human, but also elves and goblins and orcs and others? Maybe not, but I want a sandbox like that. :P

It's familiar because it's been written about in many variations, but this one is mine, to put whichever parts I like together how I like, and leave out whatever gets on my nerves.

I can build it without having as end goal having it be the stage for a huge war. I can write about a society that respects women. I can have a fantasy world where forms or democracy are the norm. I can have cultures formed by multiple intelligent species living together, rather than coding some species as Good and others as Evil.

My favourite part, though, is playing with different magic systems. Magic may be the main reason why I'm drawn to fantasy. And if magic is not limited to just a handful of people in the whole world, how does that influence life? Thinking back, the first little mosaic stone that I made up was a mage who was good at shaping wood and living plants, and decent at healing people, but had a marked inaptitude for fire magic - because I didn't want to go with the RPG-formed stereotype of fireball-flinging person of mass destruction.

I'll say one thing, though: If your aim is wholesale destruction by way of an epic war, at least it gives you a basis to hang a plot on.

Do you read high or epic fantasy? What do you like or dislike about it?

If constructed languages are required for worldbuilding these days, I'm done for. I've tried on occasion, but it seems to be too much work for too little reward.

Grammar is overwhelming. I mean, I remember the general shape of the declension and conjugation tables back in Latin, and depending how you count it, German has half a dozen or a full dozen of different ways to construct plural forms, and worst of all, when you can speak a language you do not think about grammar much.

But I at least try to have some consistency in the sound of names from the same area (or at least have a reason when I don't... the area Sylvie is from, for instance, is a bit of a melting pot that involved three major langauges, at least), or come up with rough frameworks or little quirks that might inform how someone talks in a second language, or thinks about certain things.

Like, Raaji doesn't have different words for "curse" and "gift"; they are both "qualities bestowed on someone by someone else". There's a contrasting word meaning "inherent trait of a person". Being afraid of cats because as a kid you were accidentally locked in a shed with a cat that got angry and agressive would be the former, as would be being good at embroidery because your grandfather taught you. Being afraid of spiders because you find them just creepy, or being able to get stuff off high shelves because you are tall the latter.

Also, whatever word they use for "yes" starts with R, so when speaking English (or a language I render as English because translation convention) using "right" instead of "yes" seems a likely habit.

Second-language quirks are something I can observe in myself sometimes. For example I don't use "must not". German has the expression "musst nicht". "Musst" alone would be "[you] must", "nicht" would be "not", but put together it means "need not". The English logic is "you must (not-do-that)", the German "you (must-not) do that".

I think scraps and fragments and rough ideas are enough for me. I can't help thinking I should get more systematic about inventing names, when I don't just lift real-world ones.

What's something interesting you noticed when you learned a foreign language? When considering secondary world fiction, what do you think of fantasy names vs names you find in the real world, too?