Welcome to the MythoPoet's Manual. In the last half of the 20th century, World Design has become a popular pastime. We have J. R. R. Tolkien and popular roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons to thank for that. If you want to make up the physical details of a world go to http://www.best.com/~jendave/builder/world/index.html And try his World Builder program, or use one of numerous other programs available on the web to make up internally consistent planets. Many of the rules of the world will be determined by the use to which you will put it. Fiction demands certain rules; actually a certain looseness of rules. Roleplaying and card games will demand other rules to match the rules of the game! One of the perennial problems of world design is the invention of cultures and nations that are both internally consistent and also fundamentally different from our own. This manual outlines some useful processes and strategies for making up internally consistent Myths and Cultures. Start with the Myths. The Myths believed by people explain their culture. Myths show where the world came from, why people are mortal and sexual, and why and how they need to work. In short, Myth tells people why their way of life is meaningful. And a people and their way of life is the essence of culture.
http://www.hut.fi/~vesanto/link.networld/networlds.html
http://www.hut.fi/~vesanto/world.build.html
http://www.hut.fi/~vesanto/link.useful/worlds/world.creation.html
http://www.lastunicorngames.com/ (look for Aria)
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~pound/
http://www.tezcat.com/~markrose/kit.html
Myths are not made up in laboratories or fabricated by focus groups. A Myth must grab the imagination. A Myth must sing. Words to grab the imagination, words to sing a story, words like that are poetry. And Poetry is written by a Poet. A MythoPoet is a creator of Myths. The one who can bring a song out of a story, who succeeds in making that story resonate in the imagination, is a MythoPoet.
No god, no culture hero ever revealed a profane act. Everything that the gods or the ancestors did, hence everything that the myths have to tell about their creative activity, belongs to the sphere of the sacred and therefore participates in being. In contrast, what men do on their own initiative, what they do without a mythical model, belongs to the sphere of the profane; hence it is a vain and illusory activity, and, in the last analysis, unreal. The more religious man is, the more paradigmatic models does he possess to guide his attitudes and actions. In other words, the more religious he is, the more does he enter into the real and the less is he in danger of becoming lost in actions that, being nonparadigmatic, "subjective," are, finally aberrant.
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane