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 you're writing science fiction or fantasy, designing RPGs, creating movies or video games, or remodeling a spare asteroid.
The sequel to the Language Construction Kit: learn more about constructed languages and about linguistics: logic, pidgins and creoles, sign languages, the linguistic life cycle, and a meaty step-by-step survey of morphosyntax. Create detailed and plausible languages for RPGs, fantasy and science fiction, movies, or video games ... or just learn more about how languages work with the same accurate yet fun approach as the original LCK. -- back cover
A very readable introduction to the ancient Middle East, for conlangers and anyone interested in history and languages. The regions covered are Egypt, Canaan/Israel, Mesopotamia, and Persia, from prehistory to the Greek conquest. The book covers literature, history, religion, and everyday life, and contains meaty grammatical sketches of Sumerian, Akkadian, and Biblical Hebrew, including an explanation of how cuneiform evolved and how it worked.This part of history is of particular interest because it's full of firsts— the first agriculturalists, the first cities, the first writing systems. It's also full of colorful characters, from Gilgamesh and Enkidu, to the first named poet Enheduana, to the female pharaoh Hatshepsut, to the surprisingly anti-royalist prophet Samuel.