- The Planet Construction Kit

by Mark Rosenfelder

Paperback, 2010

Status

Available

Call number

499.99

Genres

General Nonfiction

Collection

Wishlist

Publication

Yonagu Books (2010), 374 pages

Description

A companion volume to the Language Construction Kit, this book explains everything you need to know about creating your own world with its own geology, creatures, cultures, religions, technology, and styles of war- plus how to create maps, illustrations and 3-D models. An essential whether youre writing science fiction or fantasy, designing RPGs, creating movies or video games, or remodeling a spare asteroid.

User reviews

LibraryThing member ex_ottoyuhr

Rosenfelder's "Language Construction Kit", better known from the Web but also to be found in book form, is quite useful. This book is rather less so.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of most of what he writes; but I can say that his understanding of warfare is that of a generalist of forty years ago

-- he writes, unblinkingly, that arrows fired from longbows can pierce plate armor (they can't, unless they hit a joint; the English won Crecy because the French didn't have barding, Agincourt because they did have barding and tried to charge through mud), and says that the Polish cavalry charged German tanks and were massacred. (They weren't and they weren't: on two separate occasions, one in a forest and one in a city, environments where this isn't supposed to work, Polish lancers charged German infantry, routed them, and could only be driven off by tanks. At one point, they -- or rather the anti-tank guns that they towed with them -- actually drove off German tanks. Cavalry were a lot more useful in WWII than the popular image has it, in general; the Nazis had to raise cavalry divisions of their own to cope with the Soviet cavalry threat...)

So, if his understanding of war is generalist and wrong, what's to say that his understanding of everything else in this book isn't the same way? And his sample civilization is painful to read about, accepting all sorts of premises that don't make sense outside of a very narrow Western context, and written like something out of /Starcraft/. (And his understanding of technology is like something out of /Civilization/.)

So, give this book a pass...

But don't do the the same for his linguistics advice.

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