Welcome to Arum, the RM Universe (RMU for short). Arum is meant to be a unified setting, a game world where various developers can work in their projects, sharing the same background.
Since I know no one likes reading walls of text or the opening posts very much, I made a game version of the information. It will get updated with new maps and game info as needed, so I really recommend you simply play it (it’s a simple map with npcs who give out the info, nothing fancy.
-[We are updating the tutorial game, sorry for the inconvenience]-
Game tutorial information
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-If you want to appear in the Dev’s Corner, send me a PM with your data, planned projects, etc. If you have no real work done, please wait until you have something to show. -If you want to donate maps, read the rules for them and send them to me by PM.
Chatroom [The chatroom has been closed due to lack of use, but we are talking with the staff on the option of opening a subforum. More on this soon!]
Latest Updates:
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[08/03/2013] Updated info, preparing other updates. Check Indrah's post in page 4 for details. [27/07/2012] Updated information for irc channel. [26/06/2012] Updated the Games and Developers list. [09/04/2012] Added the Climate Guide and links to the Country Reference Map. [15/03/2012] Created thread and uploaded the Game Tutorial (version.0 with no donated maps and only sample Dev npc).
Games and Developers in Arum
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Please have at least a demo or a proper project page before asking to appear on the list. Form: “Game title” [status] – Author(s) (linking to their project and profile pages)
Critical Information: -The world of the RM Universe (RMU) is called Arum, and everyone can put their games inside it. -You share the world with many other developers at once, making it a good way to share lore, ideas, cameos, and much more. -Only complete games will be accepted as canon in the world (we will wait for you to finish if you are visibly making progress, though). -You can donate your maps for the project and use donated maps made by others for your own games.
Arum world map
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This is the world map, as created by Scinaya.
This version of the map holds only the countries that are canon due to their games being finished. What countries you can see here are final and fully canon for the world. If you want to view the temporary country location reference including ongoing projects, there's a link at the top of the post to the Country Reference topic.
Climate Guide:
A note from Scinaya, our resident geographer, about climate: "The climates are for reference and may not be definitive when it comes to small zones. If you need a small area withinin a cold climate zone to have different climate from its surroundings, do not make extreme changes unless there's an explanation; such as magic or volcanic activity, etc. Having a valley of temperate climate in middle of cold area is fine, as are arid areas in middle of tropics. On the other hand, tropical areas in the middle of a tundra or polar zone would need an explanation.
If you are unsure of what falls under which climate zone, here's few references and short explanations to give you the idea.
-Polar: short summers and long winters with snow and ice (some areas may not melt even during summer). To get the idea look for northern parts of Russia, Alaska, Greenland or landmasses north of the Nordic circle. Tundras and the like are prevalent.
-Cold: Winters with snow and ice, but mild or arid summers. Canada, most of Russia and Norh and East Europe are good examples of this climate zone. Pine forests are prevalent, but groves and fields are not rare either.
-Temperate: Summers are warm and winters mild. East and South Europe, US West Coast are great examples of the range within this zone. Groves and fields are prevalent and also Mediterranean climate falls under this zone.
-Dry: Common thing for dry areas is moderate or hot temperature, but the areas can vary from deserts to steppes and Savannah's.
-Tropical: Moist and hot areas. Brazil is probably best example."
Also keep in mind the scale is HUGE. What may seem a small area in this map, will be IMMENSE in the actual games. On a side note: the mountains and rivers featured on the map here are not the only ones. The ones you can see now are simply the very prominent features of the terrain. If you need mountains or rivers for your setting, you will probably be able to add them without much issue.
RMU information
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What does unified setting mean? “It's a single setting that anyone can use with the basics of the world already fleshed out but with plenty of room for you to tell your own story. Think of it like DnD settings (Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, etc.) or comic continuities (DC Universe, Marvel Universe). It's an established world with the basics, the big nations, major cities, brief parts of the history, and such all already set up for anyone to use.” (quote from Sevith)
What’s the point? -You don’t have to create a new world from scratch for your project if that’s not the point of your game. Since world building is time consuming, you can skip that step and jump right to your story. -Your projects can help shape Arum, one piece at a time. The more people who work on it, the more complex and filled the setting will be. -You don’t have to actively participate on world building to use the setting for your project. -You get access to donated maps (more on that later). -You can easily reference other games and create a canon history without having to develop all of it yourself. For example, you could reference an ancient culture, a holy crusade, great war, etc, without having to give all the details yourself.
What are the rules? -No breaking the setting. World ending, killing off important figures defined by others or other universal events should be checked out first, but remember that any event that prevents other people from using the setting will not be allowed. -No stealing other people’s characters without permission. (if you get permission to use them it’s another matter, of course). Same goes for using countries. No destroying/heavily changing them without talking to their creators first. -No using the resources for unrelated projects without permission. -Credit the creators of used resources. (There will be a log available for easy crediting).
Doesn’t this restrict creativity? If you mean: “does this mean you can’t simply make your own world as you like”, then yes. But then, how many games spanning a whole world get FINISHED? Not many. Also keep in mind that the world is HUGE. And then you have the timeline. Even if certain countries occupy certain areas at one time, you could set your game in the present, or the future.
What materials will be available? -A world map with roughly defined country borders (you don’t have to follow the map to every single detail, just the rough layout). -Donated maps. (More information about this below). -Tutorial game with information and the donation maps, updated as needed. -Obviously, a created setting. There will probably be a list of countries/factions to consult once there’s enough material.
Setting Details:
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Plase keep in mind all details are kept simple to be accessible to everyone. These are only the absolute rules of the world, but remember different factions/cultures may understand or see them differently. We intentionally leave small details out so everyone can come up with their own theories.
Magic Magic works by tapping into other worlds or dimensions and bringing power (in whatever shape or form) over. The active use of magic weakens the limits between worlds, and with time, it causes cracks or rifts that can affect the world, such as letting in other worldly creatures. Not everyone can use magic; people are born with different levels of magical affinity. Some say the actual exposure to certain locations with existing rifts and thin “walls” in the fabric of reality influences affinity. There are many theories to magic. Some believe it is a blessing from god, others an evil taint that must be purged. In any case, magic is seldom overused to due to the negative effects of rifts and cracks in reality. Every culture has its own take on magic and its origin. You can manipulate the concept as you wish in your own games, simply by binding those theories to a faction or country. For example: a church could see magic as a gift from god, while some scholars see it as something that comes from study and intelligence.
Technology Technology throughout the world varies from region to region, country to country. Though one land may be particularly advanced in some regard, a close by neighbor may seem as though it is living years in the past. Technological advancement itself varies as well, with advances in some fields being further ahead then others. On the whole, the common folk of the world prefer to live a simple and down to earth life. They rely on tools and their knowledge of the mundane to go about their day to day lives. Cities are similar, though often times more intricate forms of technology are present with the occasional fantastical items. Still, even city dwellers are more likely to rely on common tools. Overall, mundane trumps advanced. The greatest technological advancement and work in the world are currently the prototype airships that can sometimes be found throughout the larger, heavily populated and wealthy kingdoms. These ships, resembling their sea faring cousins in all ways except for the massive balloons that help keep them airborne, see many different uses from the transportation of an exceptionally wealthy merchant and his goods to machines of war. Their price of construction and complexity though ensure that only the richest lands have them, and never more then a handful. In addition, flintlock pistols and other rudimentary guns can be found in the more technologically advanced areas, but are still to costly and unreliable to be in heavy use
Races Races in the world of RMVX are comprised of regular humans and humans altered by the power of rifts into their own races. The rifts change them in many degrees, some having minor differences, such as being shorter or having pointed ears, mostly minor details. Others may be changed to the point of being wholly unrecognizable as once being human, as well as ceasing to be human entirely. These changes are not sudden, but rather occurred a long time in the past. The end result was these "altered-humans" becoming their own race. However, these generally occurred in more secluded areas, and regular humans are still the dominant race in the world. The exact number of different races and people within those races are unknown, due to most races' seclusion. However, some have been integrated into the outside world, with some areas having a higher distribution to humans and non-humans than others. Nevertheless, regular humans are still the dominant race in the world by a fairly large margin.
Countries Countries are the one aspect you can manipulate as you want. They will be displayed in the world map on your project is finished. There are a few simple rules to creating countries. First, don’t make them very large on the WORLD MAP. A big country doesn’t have to take up much space in the actual reference map, and remember it’s not only or your use, there has to be space for everyone. Second, don’t delimitate the country borders in extreme. Even if you do, remember others may have to muddle it up to make your country work with their games. Third, NO ABSOLUTE EVERLASTING EMPIRES. Remember this world has to have space for everyone. We can’t have one big bully taking over the world, it prevents freedom to the rest of the developers. There are ways around this: when we say ABSOLUTE, we mean superpowerful, magic, super duper uber powerful kingdoms. Empires rise and fall. You could make a kingdom that DID get quite big, but we ask you never take more space than you actually need. If you want to have ancient empires that crumbled, medieval empires with big bad warlords to make them collapse, that’s fine. But remember the world is a HUGE place, and what happens in a part of it need not affect the rest of the world.
Donated Maps
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What are Donated Maps? Simply, they’re complete maps developers donate for anyone to use. Anyone may donate their maps , from a project or unused, for everyone to use. This means you could simply pick up a map pack and have the maps ready and available to use as is. You could also use them as reference, if you don’t like the mapping style/resources it used, to recreate that location. This helps newbies have maps ready to simply use as a scenario for their games, or to fill out areas like small cities and towns without having to come up with original concepts yourself. We will routinely release official map packs whenever we get new ones so everyone can see all the maps in one go instead of having to browse through many different projects.
What are the rules for maps? The rules are simple: keep the maps where they belong, credit their creators, and ask permission to them before heavily modifying them. This means that if a map was designed to be a capital city in an tropical island you should not simply place it wherever you want. If you like a mapping style, you can use it as reference to create something similar, but please keep the maps where they belong.
Can I add custom graphics? You can, as long as they are properly credited (we will not tolerate resource theft) placed into their own tileset (with passability configured) and in the VX style. This means no Mack or XP style edits or differently styled customs will be taken to the donation packs. You can make them and offer them to other developers if you want, but we won’t add them to the official resources.
How do I submit donated maps? Place all the maps you want to donate in a project with nothing else. Include the credits in a separate text file in the game folder. If you can, make the basic links and teleports between areas so they are playable (and we don’t accidentally make wrong links when importing your maps to the official packs. Most importantly: keep properly named and configured tilesets. Please try, whenever possible, to make the tilesets as compact as possible so the final packs aren’t swamped with different tilesets for every single map. We accept mainly VX Ace maps, and unless we get a huge amount of maps in other formats, we won’t make packs for them. Also keep in mind we will run a basic quality check on the maps. We’re not going to discard stuff for not being a masterpiece, but we won’t accept shoddy or outright bad mapping. If you’re doubtful on your mapping abilities and quality, simply ask us in the forums if your mapping is acceptable or not, or look up some mapping tutorials.
Frequently Asked Questions [Spoiler] Why won’t you accept my ideas on magic/tech/etc for the canon? Because we’re not interested. Those things belong to your projects, not the universal setting’s core rules. What we deal in are actual CORE CANON RULES for the world. This means that whatever gets made a rule is ABSOLUTE for the whole world. As such, we don’t want people coming and explaining their project ideas as “rules”. You can have anything you want in your own project, but it doesn’t belong to the canon. Also, only finished projects count towards setting the canon. This means that until you prove you’re actually working on a project and will probably complete it, we won’t list you as a developer or put your countries up for reference.
What are the restrictions for games in the setting? It must take place in Arum and not destroy the setting (follow basic rules). There is no required length or genre for the games. It could be a full cutscene or a dungeon grind; lasting an hour or a hundred, it doesn’t matter. Please remember Arum is supposed to be a “serious” world. Filling an island with dinosaurs, teletubbies, ninjas, power rangers, sparkly vampires, anime characters, etc, will not fly. We will not usually mind whatever you come up with, but please, no random and “lolz” type of games. You know what we mean. You can use any graphic style you want. We follow a RTP VX style for the donation packs because it’s the default one and the easiest one to find resources for, is all. You can make a full graphic custom project if you want, what matters is that it takes place inside the Arum setting.
Can we donate music/characters/other resources? You could, but we won’t list them or package them. We will accept donated maps, and release project packs when there is enough content, but we do not support other resources. This doesn’t mean you can’t offer them to other developers, we simply won’t be handling it.
What RM programs do you support? We will chiefly work with the ACE Rpg Maker for official releases, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use the setting with older programs. You won’t have the donated maps to work with, is all.
Contact We usually hang out at the #wormvx channel at irc.synirc.net. If you have any questions that can’t be answered here, you can send me a PM (Indrah)
Support Lacking any sort of graphical skill, I made an exceedingly crappy support bar. If someone can do better, please have mercy on RMU by sending a less lame support bar for us to use OTL Paste this on your sig:
More questions? Ask away, I’ll give as many details as I can. I ask that you please don’t clutter this thread with your game ideas. That sort of thing can be discussed in your game pages or the feedback forums, please leave this forum for feedback on the RMU project itself.
Wow, I might have to see if I can get Chronicles of Eric in this once I flesh it out a bit more. World creation has never been my strong point and I've tried to get a unified setting going once myself, but apathy from others prevented it from ever happening.
Looking forward to what everyone produces with this and this will most definitely boost community spirit a bunch!
I don't have OCD, I have CDO. They're in alphabetical order, like they should be.
So the world map... towards the extreme north and south, what's there? Uncharted world? The end of the world, falling into an endless abyss?
There is the north and south pole~ The world map has similar projection as this real world map here! The map is supposed to wrap horizontally and the whole upper edge of the map is the very center of north pole (similar thing goes for south pole). I know it is a bit confusing, but I used that projection for the map to keep it simple shape to draw. While this projection would be more intuitive to view, such is harder to get right, so I went forward where the fence was lowest.
(The horizontal lines represent the Equator in the middle, the first lines up and down from there are the northern and southern Tropics and the northmost and southmost lines mark the polar circles. I hope that helps a bit in getting hang of the map, as well.) <3
Ahahaha... Though, it would be wonderful to have the superstitious grandpas believe there is fall into abyss. Whatever would work for the developer I presume? .o.
Aso the sun, moon, planets, universe revolve around the world right? ; ) and this is a massive collaboration I think, right now I only got vague idea how this would work on our fellow rpgmakerace users but concept looks good.
@scinaya:
There is the north and south pole~ The world map has similar projection as this real world map here! The map is supposed to wrap horizontally and the whole upper edge of the map is the very center of north pole (similar thing goes for south pole). I know it is a bit confusing, but I used that projection for the map to keep it simple shape to draw. While this projection would be more intuitive to view, such is harder to get right, so I went forward where the fence was lowest.
Not good with world mapping but that certainly helps when I create my map.
It's likely that the universe is heliocentric like ours. As for other planets, I'm not sure... seeing as the whole point is to take place on Arum. Maybe when we have a lot more games and a defined history and stuff will the outer limits be considered. You'd have to ask Indrah on that one.
And yeah, I'm not good with mapping large worlds either, so this and the planned map packs will be a nice boon for me and many others.
I don't have OCD, I have CDO. They're in alphabetical order, like they should be.
Hah, I had really never thought about the whole sun/moon thing before. :I
There is a sun and moon, because damn, pretty much at some point in every game or novel or ANYTHING it would be mentioned, even in passing.
I'm...not too convinced on letting people actually add more sun/moons, as it's a very personal thing. I'd say to stick to one sun and one moon, that work similarly to our own.
For star constellations tho, do whatever you want XD I don't see how people could be aganist you coming up with your own, sicne they don't influence the actual planet that I can see :I
As for world mapping: let me be clear, YOU can do WHATEVER you want for your game. You don't have to use the reference map in your game to do a world map at all if that's not for you. Just don't put continents where they don't belong :I The reference map is simply that, reference. If youre touching on a very small area, you may not even want to comment on other countries, much less the whole world.
Unless they do affect the world somehow? I mean, giant holes in space-time can do strange things to a universe... but I do agree with one sun and moon, seeing as any more and it would be a nightmare of physics. I ruin sci-fi films for myself because as soon as something that defies the laws of physics crops up, I start criticising it like mad. (If all the Startroopers are clones, why are they all different sizes?!) More moons would cause havoc on the tides and... well, you get the gist.
Oh, I know that about the world mapping. It will still be a great help because I'll already have an idea where everything goes or the vague, general structure of something. That way I won't have to start completely from scratch.
I don't have OCD, I have CDO. They're in alphabetical order, like they should be.
The main thing about one/more astral bodies is that its a largely SPECIFIC thing. While some people may want 3 moons, others may want 7, and others will piss on the concept an bitch until we have only 1. It's easier to simply keep it at 1. :I It's what EVERYONE knows, and has the highest compatibility. (Physics? Wazzat? I personally never once took that into cosnideration, magic makes the world go arouuund XD But jokes aside, yes. Better keep it simple.)
There is the north and south pole~ The world map has similar projection as this real world map here! The map is supposed to wrap horizontally and the whole upper edge of the map is the very center of north pole (similar thing goes for south pole). I know it is a bit confusing, but I used that projection for the map to keep it simple shape to draw. While this projection would be more intuitive to view, such is harder to get right, so I went forward where the fence was lowest.
(The horizontal lines represent the Equator in the middle, the first lines up and down from there are the northern and southern Tropics and the northmost and southmost lines mark the polar circles. I hope that helps a bit in getting hang of the map, as well.) <3
Ahahaha... Though, it would be wonderful to have the superstitious grandpas believe there is fall into abyss. Whatever would work for the developer I presume? .o.
Oh man, an answer from the cartographer herself! I'll admit it was the north pole that threw me off, but that makes sense. Thanks for the clear answer!
Is there an established terminology for the days of the week, months, and seasons or is that country specific and also do they work the same as real life?
I suspect most people will stick to the real world time measures, but you could simpy change the perception of time in the country your game takes place in.
You could make it so different countries or cultures have different calendars, much like Julian, Gregorian and Jewish here in the boring place called reality. I know that's what I'll be doing because I like toying with the idea of cultural differences and thus cross-cultural interactions.
I don't have OCD, I have CDO. They're in alphabetical order, like they should be.
Good job porting over all the information, Indrah! You're always so on-the-ball.
Anyways, I'd just like to add that RMU will be officially operating out of this forum from now on. In keeping with the name change, we wanted to make sure that the world will be able to stay strong and be as accessible to as many people as possible now and way down the line.
This'll be awesome. Y'all should, y'know, hop on board.
Right now, seeing as no games are part of the universe yet, everything is still pretty much a blank slate. Seeing as you have varying regions, countries and times to work with, you should have free reign with something as inconsequential as plants. The ruleset isn't very strict anyway, so you should be free to come up with whatever you need to, unless some plants/ores etc. are extremely essential to the story or area it takes place in.
I don't have OCD, I have CDO. They're in alphabetical order, like they should be.
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