#do i have . tag canceled because the exact tag i was gonna type got recced to me

[cats-of-eden-valley]

if i could ask for like. some advice on naming things and creating creatures would you be willing? you dont have to if you dont wanna..

the thing with my world is that its a magically infested england and scotland thats been evacuated, leaving sentient cats named trolousa behind... so im working with mutated by magic animals and stuff <:]

oh man ive kinda been pondering my own creativity and where my ideas come from, so to speak, especially in regards to magic and how i wanna utilize it in my worldbuilding (for coev, but also for the WIP that's currently giving me worms rn fjfjf)

anyways,

ideas kind of beget more ideas, is the good news. the hard part is deciding on your base, which you've already got! magic that causes mutations! and in abandoned scotland and england as well!

research is some of the best ways to get ideas, and when i see your idea the FIRST thing i think is you need to do research on cherbobyl and other radiation disasters. not about the tragedy, though, so much as the life that continued in its wake.

one of the things you would learn is that melanistic mutations (which turn the animals colours darker/black) see a spike, because it provides protection to the animal from the radiation.

and in that one sentence alone, you have a thousand questions you could ask, which is the next part of worldbuilding. first question: if magic is analogous to radiation, then does that mean it has harmful effects? how do animals adapt to them?

and then the next step is you get fucking insane about it. melanistic mutations are cool but they're not as fantastical as you might want, so you can go ahead and make huge leaps such as "magic can be used by creatures to do X" and "animals needed to evolve ways to contain magic if they want to use it because its like housing radiation in your own body" and stuff like that. this is the stage where you get to utilize your most fucked up of interests to shape the direction you go. like if you like body horror, you focus on the grotesque aspects of magic = radiation. this is the part of the creative process where you need to know and trust your own interests and desires--you will find something profound when you pursue the bits that actually, truly interest you rather than spending hours following a curated list of worldbuilding questions

(which is not to bash worldbuilding questions, all im saying is if you want to spend 3894 hours researching radiation and the effects thereof because you're completely fucking deranged and don't really care about stuff like. cities and population density then it's your gift to yourself to put your entire pussy into radiation research because THAT is the thing that will enrich your story)

anyways, coming back to actually creating the creatures, you might by now over the course of your research already have ideas for things like common mutations and whatnot, which you can then go on to research the flora and fauna of england today and start maybe putting together what happened to them (each of them, one by one, is what i would do because that is my idea of a great time), how they adapted, etc

as for names well. i hate naming shit okay. truly the only solution i have is to give them a filler name and either that becomes the real name or i find something along the way.