• Your best-developed character meets with a mysterious man in all black with sunglasses. He presents your character with a red and blue pill. The red pill will shatter their reality. The blue will keep their delusions alive. Which pill will they choose and why? By East Malaysia

• [Part of the 5 Senses Series] Many professional Geoguessr players look at small details like license plates, telephone poles, and the lines on roads to try and guess which country they’re in! What sorts of small details could a Geoguessr player look for to immediately recognize your country? By Gonggong/Star Flowers

• Want to have your worldbuilding prompt or scenario featured? Maybe make a CYOA series? Fill out this form today!
  

Let us know your answers! The best ones will get featured in the next edition! Post it on the RMB (mention East Malaysia). We also have a channel on Discord #worlds-to-build. By the next edition we will also have Worlds to Build as an exclusive spot where you can post your prompts, all things worldbuilding, conlangs, etc. for anyone not on Discord!

con·lang
/ˈkänˌlaNG/
a language that has been artificially created; a constructed language.
Definition from Oxford Languages and Google

The word is "cralapat", which means dry, and literally means, "cra-lapat" : "[opposite]-wet", moreover "cra-lap-at" : "[opposite]-water-[adjective]"

Click here if you would like to take a look at the full article that includes Gong's introductory about conglangs!

Before I start, I want to thank Neography for providing the images used in this article!

This article assumes that you already know what type of writing system you want for your script, as well as the writing direction and number of glyphs! If you don’t have that I suggest you do so before continuing!

Scripts in the real world have evolved into the ones we know and love today. The familiar Roman Alphabet traces its origins back to Egyptian Hieroglyphs. If you’re feeling inspired, you can do a similar process of drawing pictographs over and over again and simplifying them as you do so. This method works for all types of writing systems, be it Alphabet or Logography, although Logographies require at least some complexity in their characters to be able to make as many as they need so don’t simplify too much for them! As you do this, you’ll likely end up with your very first script!

This is a starter script that intentionally has a lot of mistakes woven into it. As we go on learning about the principles of design and applying them to scripts, we’ll refine these characters to be more consistent and have a guiding aesthetic.

One thing you could add to make your characters feel more coherent is a graphical motif. Some graphics that repeat throughout the characters can help your script feel cohesive. Additionally, you could add constraints to your script, such as how Buginese script only has diagonal lines, or how Futhark has no curves. These constraints often stem from the writing utensil or the writing medium used.

In this second iteration of the script, the sharp corners of the characters were rounded and the diagonals were made to be parallel to each other. Remember that this is a creative process, so feel free to pick and choose which of these principles apply to your script!

One problem that occurred in the script while adding cohesion is that the first and last characters are now unrealistically similar to one another. There are several ways to fix this, such as adding diacritics, changing the shape, or redoing that character altogether. Here, we will add a line beneath the first character to differentiate it.

Now, let’s start getting into proportions! For a cohesive cast of characters, having some regularity among the proportions of the characters is a must. Several languages in the real world do this in different ways. Some languages make their characters have constant height and width, which gives the characters a sort of blocky look. Others make height constant but allow characters to vary in width. Some languages have no restrictions on height or width for any of their characters. Regardless of which one you choose, remember that most languages with variable height or width usually follow a bell curve in which most characters share similar proportions with a few exceptions.

Most of the time, height differences between characters come from ascenders (such as the top line on the letter b) or descenders (such as the hanging hook on the letter g). These ascenders and descenders always follow a predictable pattern. In English, ascenders and descenders are always the same length above and below the base letter line that they come from. Other languages, such as Khmer, have much more complex ascender and descender rules:

Whatever you end up making, make sure to stick to it! These only really don’t apply if you’re planning on making a logography or a script of similar complexity, because there’s so much variation between characters it's nearly impossible to create guidelines for their ascenders or descenders.

Applying the above principles to the example script, we get this:

We’re onto the final stretch, there’s one last thing we can do to make our script look that much more appealing: Typography! There are many different types of ways to type letters, be it traditional print, sans serif, or any other kind of typeface. Line thickness is another factor that you should consider in your script. You could go with uniform line thickness, which is the easiest in terms of workload. Additionally, you could go with variable line thickness at a fixed angle, which is one of many factors that give the Arabic script its unique “swooshy” feel. And lastly, there’s just straight-up variable line thickness. Variable line thickness is used in the traditional Roman alphabet (think of the Time New Roman font). The final topic we’re going to touch on regarding script design is serifs. Serifs can either be very very small and barely noticeable, or the script could be completely dominated by its serifs. There are no steadfast rules for serifs, so feel free to go with whatever looks right to you!

Applying what we’ve just talked about to the example script, we end up with this:

I’m sure you’ll agree that this script looks much better than the script we started with, which if you’re curious used to look like this:

And there’s no right or wrong when applying these principles to a script! You could start from the same original script, but have ended up in a completely different spot! The key to good script design is to experiment with what you like. I hope that these tips have come in handy for you!

Before I begin this RMB feature, I would like to preemptively mention that this feature will contain many, many references to in-world locales and nations that those outside of The East Pacific's RMB roleplay map may not be familiar with. As such, I highly suggest that you check out the official account for Valsora and read their dispatches about the world and its geographical locations.

However, with the advent of widespread international trade and its prevalence in the modern world, it was bound to happen that a select few would abuse free trade to support themselves at the cost of those around them. That, abusing the trust of a ship's crew they would steal and pilfer and be an economic drag on those that have to suffer at their greed.

This is the problem that plagues the Demetric community today. Since October 2033, upwards of 689 vessels have been attacked and assaulted by pirates and various terrorist groups, with most attacks having been traced to a failed state known as the Pirate States, a highly organised group of pirates situated in the north of Aislada. Thanks to these attacks, more than 357 million USD has been lost to the illicit activity these groups carry out on these vessels.

The equipment that is stolen very likely ends up on the black market if it is not used by the thieves themselves.

As such, in response to these attacks, an intergovernmental organisation known as the Intermaritime Commercial Security Office has been proclaimed. Headed by the Republic of Atrocha, the ICSO is effectively the antithesis to the pirates and terrorists that willingly attack trade vessels in the interest of personal financial benefit. It is hoped that the efforts of this organisation can curtail if not outright bring a permanent end to these pirates and their heinous operations for good.

Time will tell what these efforts will culminate in. Very hopefully, it will bring to an end the constant assault on free trade. No one person should benefit from a system designed for everyone.