Needles & Nilbogs

I am so close to being done with the school year, I can almost reach out and stab it. However, I have AP exams, the SAT, and finals trying to murder me first, which doesn’t leave much time for writing (except for the essays). Instead of continuing this horrifying metaphor of murder, I’m just going to note that until the last couple weeks of May, blogging will be delayed, possibly canceled, and almost certainly lackluster (hey, SAT word!).  So, have some cool pictures, with minimal explanations, of things I did this spring break! This is actually just going to be the “travel” post, since I have an AP test next Friday and figure I should do the craft-related post next Thursday so I can cram in more studying. Fair warning, lots of pictures under the cut.

 Continuing on from the past two posts, this is the final part of a 3 part series dealing with textiles and traditions in fantasy worlds.  Today, I’m going to give a few examples of textiles in RPG worlds that I’ve built, but first I want to briefly talk about working these into a game. Working worldbuilding into an rpg plot is a complex subject and requires a lot more effort than I can give right now to cover comprehensively, but specifically for textiles, one thing I do is to describe what clothes people are wearing. This is especially useful if clothes denote something special in society, but even if they don’t, “light brown linen robes” and “neon yellow polyester raincoat” come from two very different cultures and textile traditions, and imply two very different levels of technology. Beyond clothing, consider dropping in household items — a “woven rug with geometric patterns” can give a good setting to a scene and reinforce bits of culture, or a tablecloth could be made ...

This is a continuation of the series I started one two weeks ago: textile traditions in fantasy worlds  and how you build them. Part 1 was about general ideas for how cultures interact with textiles, and this part (part 2) is about specific traditions for your culture. I assume anyone reading this, fair warning, has already read part 1 and has sort of a general idea of their culture’s textile traditions and history. Or at the very least, a couple of ideas about materials and workers and tools.  This week, we’re focusing on specific textile traditions in a culture. This means things that have been handed down for at least a few generations (traditions are passed down from person to person) relating to fabric and its role in people’s lived (textiles are mostly not-everyday-clothing-things but more like rugs and blankets and special clothing) that are reasonably compact to define and easy to drop into an rpg world (specific means not going into 300 years of detailed history all ...

 No post today, too swamped this week with work and I didn’t get to finish the thing I planned. I will put pt 2 of the textile traditions thing up once I finish it, and if it’s not up by Saturday-ish, then it’ll be next week’s post.