Do you love worldbuilding for stories, games and other adventures? Do you delight in populating your world with terrifying monsters, wondrous creatures, and fantastic beasts? Do you know how to design these creatures so they feel like plausible parts of their environments? Because if you don’t, readers could be throwing your book against the wall in frustration at your lack of understanding.
Why do ocean mammals live mostly at the poles?
Why do vertebrates have four limbs?
Why don’t we have giant bugs?
And most importantly, how does this impact your story?
Find out now in How To Create Life!
Contains step-by-step instructions for creating your own incredible plants and awe-inspiring animals that will add conflict and bring your stories to life!
Introduction
The aim of this book is to help to build your own plants, animals, and other life—not because you need to start from scratch and reinvent every single living thing on your world, but because sometimes it’s just plain fun to have a funky plant or animal that does what you need it to do.
Done well, invented plants and animals can lend colour and realism to a created world, and can even prompt new cultural developments for your people.
But done poorly, you can end up with plants or animals that will have savvy readers questioning what you were thinking.
So because plants and animals, just like people, are influenced by their surroundings, this book aims to give you the general principles of logic behind several key features of plant and animal biology. This will allow you to create life that doesn’t just exist in its environment, but flourishes.
Firstly, we’ll explore plant life:
- the general types of plants
- their physical structures
- how they ‘breathe’
- how they reproduce
- their senses and defences.
Then we’ll move on to animals, starting with a brief discussion of why Earth-based life is founded on carbon and oxygen, and what other alternatives you might have. We’ll cover:
- the musculoskeletal system
- heat regulation and water loss
- the digestive system
- nutrient circulation (breathing and blood)
- reproduction
- the senses.
Finally, we’ll explore all those tiny things that are neither plant nor animal:
- archaea
- bacteria
- Protista (including algae)
- fungi
- viruses.
This will equip you with an excellent understanding of the basic logic behind the life forms you see around you, and the ability to extrapolate and design suitable life forms for any environment you might wish to create.
Have fun!