Hello Everyone!

I did hesitate for a while before starting this thread, mostly because of the size and general slowlyness of this project over the years. Working mostly with a friend and with support from others with different expertise, we tried to approach the world-building from a bottom-up perspective.
While this isn't something unheard of on this forum (actually, plenty of remarkable projects in that direction here), it can be overwhelming at times even for a small group of people working on that. We're in two actively working on this (a physicist and a history buff) with several helps from a biologist, an archeologist and a few other "specialists"

To keep things in order, we even built a wiki, which is practical for archiving but very bad at showing the amount of content produced so far.
http://worldeleven.wikidot.com/

So, let's start from the beginning: I will try to split this in multiple posts, from the very basis.

Why the name?
To kickstart the project, we researched and tested several softwares that generate planets.
The chosen one was Worldbuilder, for a few features and simulative logics that it applies. http://experilous.com/1/blog/post/wo...-0-2-0-release
The main goal was to have a reasonably looking world with tectonics and everything, but rather than splitting them ourselves we used a simulator: dividing the sphere in voronoi cells and clustering them, it defined plates and movements. At the same time, the software calculates a rough heigth map and the overall biomes.

Over 15 world... the 11th was the chosen one.
15Worlds.png

the 11th was the chosen one.
11.jpg

Now, till this point there is no actual cartography involved. Actually, there won't be much in this post.

What happens next?
From the bare rocky land (the actual planet parameters are slightly different from Earth's, but nothing dramatic) life evolved, I guess. At a point, we got humans (or pan-humans, or something close enough). They originated in a fairly big island in the southern tropical region the size of central europe. The region was large enough to have different ethnic groups, but with the early migrations (a small ice age simplified movements) towards two different continents the population got split in a more drastic way: after the end of the cold period the previously crossable seas became impassable, and the original continent lost most of its jungles becoming barren and uninviting. Within 60.000 years speciation happened, and the two groups were not interfertile.

human-migration.png

Of course, that degree of separation brought two entirely different language groups, and serious physical differences as well as traditions.


That's it for now. A lot more has to follow. Including - erm - maps.