Been a while since I've started a topic...

...but this subject has made me grow more and more curious since I've joined. Simply, how big do you portray the fields, mountains, forests, towns, and just about every other piece of the ZFRPG's setting? Before I go on, I want to clarify that this is by no means an effort to standardize anything. That would cause major confusion. Now, that said, on to my point. It's kinda long.

When I first joined, I portrayed Hyrule, the Ocean, and Termina in my posts as they were in the games. Each house, each tree, each rock, it was all to scale. Obviously, as a Zelda fan on a Zelda RPG, I felt almost obligated to adhere to the guidelines set forth by the games themselves. Sure, I added a house or two, and some characters to fit Arsenic's story, but even those I tried to integrate as well I could to the setting the polygonal landscapes of OoT and MM portrayed. As far as I could tell, the other players at the time did the same, and so I was satisfied that I was on track. That I was right.

However, besides the obvious gradual improvement of writing skills that came with more and more experience and age, a change took place in my roleplaying. No longer was Termina Field some ring-shaped spit of land that acted as the thin border between Clocktown and the outlying regions. It, according to my writing, was a true field, eventually fields, a mass of land that took days to traverse, like something of a true nation. I can't say when I began to do this. It too was gradual, and it wasn't just the fields that were subject to this expansion. Market Town began to have streets, and the number of vendors expanded to fit, as did housing. Even bars appeared, inns, and every other location a true town would have. It became a city, full of nameless inhabitants, each with vaguely described lifestyles that would flesh out as Arsenic's story required. If the image of Market Town I gradually were mapped out into an explorable, 3D setting, it would look nothing like the Market Town we know from OoT. The square and Temple of Time, of course, would be there, but the town would also be at least fifty times larger. Streets would form grids, and from these grids would form districts.

Now I fast-forward to the present. According to my roleplaying, Clocktown has experienced this same transformation. North Clocktown has empty plots of grass, sure, but also a lot of houses, a few estates, even an inn or two. Much more than one little dirt road, obviously. West Clocktown, known as the economic sector, has ten times the amount of shops, as well as more than just that one stair-step street. South Clocktown, in addition to the clock tower itself and a bunch of empty space that is what we assume to be the town square, has apartments, townhouses, and vendors set up in what resembles those vacant wooden stands on either side of the district. East Clocktown has perhaps suffered the least from this expansion, but trust me, there are things there that do not exist in the game.

This, of course, is all in my writing. I know some have been influenced by my own distortions, and I in turn have used invented locations that others have established. The fact is, I can hardly imagine the originals without some sort of expansion now. It's been a decent while since I've played Majora's Mask, but having played Ocarina as recently as a few moths ago, I can say that I was shocked, for instance, at how small Market Town was. I literally ran through the whole "town," just to see how far my imagined city had grown from the simplistic, fixed images of the original.

I do, of course, have a series of rationales for this. The first and foremost is the realization that this is much more realistic. The original games were developed with a single player in mind, plus they had to fit the game within the constraints of the N64 cartridge. This RPG, on the other hand, harbors and has harbored a plethora of players, most of which, unlike Link, have families, friends (though Link had a few in both Hyrule and Termina), and many other acquaintances. Rather than tack on the dwellings of these beings to create a frankenstein of a world, or leave them homeless, I rationalized that the world of the RPG had to be scaled to fit this new scenario. Hyrule is a kingdom after all, and a great kingdom is going to have more, than say, ten houses and five or so shops in its biggest municipality. Those numbers are, of course, rough estimations, taking into account the supposed apartment windows we see in the back alleys in the game.

My second rationale is, surprisingly, the scenarios that our beloved Storyteller has created. For example, the stairs that lead up to the walkable top of Clocktown's great circular wall. Neither of those were in the game. Suddenly, I didn't feel so bad about adding in a few houses, when the Storyteller him/herself was adding expansions such as these. Another major one was the Mage Tower, which proved to me with its nine stories that just because it wasn't in the game, didn't mean it couldn't exist here. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, it was near the tower's introduction that Market Town began to truly transform into a city for Arsenic.

Oh boy. I could go on about every little house, shop, and square foot of land I've stuffed into my posts, and just about every one that I have yet to type into future ones. That's not the real point of this thread though.

I want to know what settings and locational proportions everyone else here has invented for this RPG, and to what extent. I have a little hypothesis that, in general, the more time one spends on here, the more the world grows around their character(s). I want to see if that's right.

And, perhaps more importantly, I want to make sure that I'm not crazy.

What a fun topic!

Well, before I came to Zeldafront, I wrote a lot of Zelda fanfiction, and from those stories I changed a lot of Hyrule--but not Termina so much, because my fanfictions weren't about Termina at the time. So, I think what you said was true, about there being a gradual change to the size and scale of things the longer you spend around them. My explanations are going to be a mix between my fanfiction ideas and what I've gotten to in the RP (I only seem able to expand the places I've been.) I often get them confused, so this'll be interesting . . .

Seriously, what's the fun of keeping to a world that never grows aside from game maps?

Edit: (Sorry in advance for anything that's confusing. I forgot I was tired when I wrote this O.O;; ) /edit

Castle Town became, for Rea, a whole mess of houses and alleys, similar to TP Castle Market (but bigger, and more like London.) It even had a good side and a bad side of town. A ritzy side, a middleclass side, and other cultural divides. There were factions, guilds. I even had a sanctified order xD It was where you choose a goddess to follow after. There were houses against the wall. There were shops all over the place, not just in the market, crazy bars and inns where you would find not the best kind of company, but most of the well-to-do shops were either on the market or in a secluded area (those places that people took the time to visit because they did such good business that even castle denizens got their goods there.) The city had parks and playgrounds and schoolhouses, and random holes-in-walls, where some people lived. As the event went on, more and more houses became abandoned, children walked the streets alone, and the place got rather dirty and unkempt. Rough folk walked about more freely. There was a jail, of course. The Post Office had at least fifty workers when Rea was there, and even more workers out in the field and doing other duties--or running away to Ikana. The Temple of Time (though I wouldn't have roleplayed this), was a cathedral, with several arched passageways and confusing side passages and servant passages and even a kind of collection of catacombs, where there were tombs and items of spiritual possession.

If Rea hadn't gone to Ikana, she would have joined a rag-tag group of kids whose goal it was to stay alive during the terror that Ikana had shrouded Castle Town in. She would have jumped across rooftops and swung around buildings--there were tons of buildings. You never got to see the inside of Hyrule Castle in the game, but in my stories the place was huge, with two or three sets of walls surrounding it. In the RP, I never got to visit there, so I'm not sure how I imagine it yet.

The only thing I didn't ever decide on (it actually never crossed my mind o.O) was what was behind Hyrule Castle. I don't even remember what was behind it on the map. A cliff? That would eventually have become a secret hideout and passageway for Link and Zelda, probably.

As for Clocktown, that place has pretty much stayed the same :\ Although, the wooden steps leading behind the Clock Tower to other parts of town have disappeared, the walls are more massive, things are generally bigger. There are houses and alleyways, but the city is built in such a way that the alleys are tiny and cramped. The houses are out of sight except from above (sort of an aesthetic thing?) Because Clocktown never expanded, it had to build up, which is why it got more cramped through time. Most everybody knows how I view the Observatory. Erm, it was bigger, and at the moment broken and ransacked--but filled with mechanical wonders. I personally thought that since the spinner thing that TP Link had was kind of like gears, and clocks had gears, it would only make sense for the observatory man to have come up with something similar to the spinner--or even the spinner itself.

I like your expanded view of Clocktown, though. I think Clocktown could use some decorative balconies, too, places to hold parties (I think Terminians love parties) and when you explained West Clocktown, I got an idea. Once again, agreeing with the expanding up theory, there would be wooden stairs going up and up in zigzags up and down the street, back and forth until you hit the top of the wall. The stairs would give access to various houses and shops that were built into the adobe brick. Houses and shops built on top of each other ^.^ There would be hanging clothes and banners, of course, and hanging plants, and private balconies and verandas, as well as fans for hot summer days, and maybe even to power tea-making machines.

When I go from thinking about my own fanfictions to the RP, it's sometimes hard to decide which changes I should keep for the RP, and which would be waaaaay overdoing it. I do my best.

I think other people's posts and how they write them can change how you view places, too. Whenever I read Jenas' posts, Clocktown suddenly becomes bigger. Waaaaay bigger O.O

OH! Zora's Domain! I was designing my second character, but she hasn't been employed yet because I wasn't sure I could handle two characters when one was in an event. I wanted to give myself breathing space to learn. Anyhow, Zora's Domain was MUCH bigger underwater than in the game. There were tunnels and underwater caverns that led to dangerous caverns with sharp cavern walls and deadly stalagmites and stalactites. One underground river eventually flowed out of a hole in a cliff and into the river that goes through Gerudo Valley.

Kakariko Village became a bigger village, too. It was spread out through the mountains, so it was pretty quiet. There were three windmills, instead of just one, and the grassy streets were waaaaay longer. And Lon Lon Ranch had extra farm hands in my stories. But, once again, never got there in the RP.

I think that's all I've got . . . I love building cities, though. Now I'm going to want to draw them. Gah XD

I shouldn't have read all the details in your post because now I'm going to want to implement them. Serious about that.

I really like your ideas about Clocktown because, really, that's how it's built up in my mind. I actually had a couple characters visit a random apartment/penthouse sort of thing in South Clocktown, and I believe I had it occupying the fourth and fifth floors of a building built into that adobe brick. And yes, it had balconies. Nice, big ones, with big windows that looked out onto them. Clocktown really does seem like a partying town, anyways. What with all the banners, and the Carnival of Time, everything like that.



Definitely this. I never described the differences in great detail, but I have stated these exist, and I know for a fact that others have in the past, too. Arsenic, for instance, lives with two of his childhood friends in a one-story apartment in the "middle class" district, while his parents have a generous two-story townhouse in the generally more upper class part. Also, an old London, perhaps changed a bit stylistically to fit the medieval template, is was very accurate way to describe what I see too.



Yes, yes yes. I think I have, at one point or another, used these in the RPG.

And now that you mention Lon Lon, I also admit that I really really wanted to expand Hyrule Field too. Like, actual farms, that span acres upon acres. Like this:



That picture is old and small, but it's actually an image from the beta OoT. You can see what appears to be crop fields on either side of a wide dirt road (a main thoroughfare, perhaps?), as well as what I can only describe as the edge of a forest in the distance on the right. There is absolutely nothing on the horizon above that road, though. It looks like a massive expanse of land.

As for behind Hyrule Castle, I imagined a few steep hills behind it, which turn into the foothills for the mountain range that Death Mountain crowns. Actually, I'm going to kick myself for posting this because I never finished it and it's old, but this is a take I had on the situation of the castle and its walled town:



Obviously, there should be things in those walls, which is one of the things I never finished. That aside, if I were to do this now, the walls would be much smaller in proportion to the mountains, and also shorter and thinner to facilitate a much more expansive town. This actually isn't how I'd want to portray things in the RPG, but just a new take on that area. Were it finished, the town would actually be on an incline, almost tiered with Hyrule Castle at the tallest point (think Minas Tirith, just much shorter and without the big rock jutting out).

EDIT: I'm also in the process of designing Clocktown with Google Sketchup, believe it or not.

*points at map below post* Ah, the joys of nifty little admin tricks.
I wish I could've based it more on the TP map, I could've made Hyrule field way, way bigger. But we have a beach!!1!

Either way, I think this is the most plausible we can get as far as geography goes. I realise that there isn't any agriculture or other farmland than LonLon Ranch. I've already moved the entire forest to make room for the beach! (Yes, I'm very happy with Hyrule's beach! I'll make a Great Sea map too, once I get time. )

I once had a brilliant plan of making environment-sketches for the area too, but as with all of my plans procrastinating was more fun.


There's still the white blotch too. Anyone care to make speculations?


EDIT: And yes, Hyrule Castle Market Town is a lot bigger than it is in OoT. So Rea was right to make it more messy, like London.

I love this thread! Especially since it can really change and improve our beautiful children writings ^^

As Arsenic mentioned, there's a restricting limit too how big a city could be in a N64. I too believe that all the buildings and landmarks are symbolic in the games. One shop stands for a at least a dozen of more shops, and one Inn is just to portrait there are inns in the town. Two constructing guys represent a whole guild, etc.
(Just your stories in short, but still ^^")

Furthermore, I'd like to say that Clocktown reminded of how (ancient) Rome changed in the first century AD. During the time August was in power (27 BC-14 AD), he made Rome into the glorious city we came to know. He kept the civilians content with "bread and games", and even had a minister of art. Because of the great wealth during his time, he managed to achieve great architectural achievements. A famous line of him is: "I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble."
(Extra information: emperor Vespesian (reigning from 69-79 AD) taxed urine, and thus gaining a fortune -which he also used to build the Colosseum-. This is where the famous line "Pecunia non olet" came from; "Money doesn't smell".)

The parallel I see with Clocktown is that it's a city in development, with great technical developments. Just like the Romans in their golden era (the Pax Romana), the Terminians in Clocktown focused on the practical, there's also quite some attention for cultural matters, like dancing and festivals.
I know this hasn't got anything to do with the geography and relative size, but it helped me getting into the "Clocktown spirit". ^^'

(Also, I can't help but mentioning Assassin's Creed (II) here. There's immense "reconstructed" cities, with dozens of shops and hundreds of "different" people across the vast grid of streets.)




First two minutes sorta illustrate what I meant

This is one of the reasons why I'd love to recreate my own version of Ocarina of Time someday.

Well, I personally have roleplayed there and I find it funny how remarkably similar our concept of Hyrule Castle is. Wrinkles once made a "visit" and stole some food from the kitchens. In the marketplace, I distinctly imagine the little square part very busy, and with a greater capacity for houses, stores, and streets. I also added more places to the square itself, such as Happy Hamilton's.

I haven't been to Clock Town in the RP, but if anyone here has seen the movie Paprika, I imagine it with that kind of vibrant business. The parades in that movie were chaotic, but the colors and movement just remind me of how Clock Town would be in a festival. I think of it as a city that never sleeps. And then in Ikana, I have no idea how that looks in the video game, so just from screenshots, I've made my own version. It has not ever stayed the same between two posts.

I really like this idea! Hehe, it sounds fun to have guilds. And the Goddesses Order thing could easily be incorporated into a large-scale story.


I, too, agree with this idea. I think it's reinforced by how Castle Town is depicted in TP. There are districts, the market is huge, there are literal holes-in-walls. While it is supposed to take place in later years, I think the idea is that Castle Town was always envisioned to be a thriving Medieval metropolis.

We can also see, by looking to TP, that the field is much, much larger than in OoT. Time would not explain how it had grown to that degree.
And, because I can, if you calculate Link's speed running from Kokiri Forest to the Castle Market walls, (human running speed averaging between 19-24kph, and it taking around 16h) we get a distance of 300-310km (186-192m). So even from that, we can see that the Field is not such a small place.

I realize it's been a good week and a half since the last post, and that it's been a good /month/ and a half since /my/ last post, but I saw this and had to chime in.

I must say, I've always extended upon everything. On top of the obvious extensions in the cities, and making the fields (Hyrule Field and Termina Field respectively), I aimed with Ranuu to expand on the temples, to not only give them more square footage, but also more of a reason for being there. In Hyrule Field (as well as Termina, with Caladuir), I put small villages and settlements, similar to outposts, where the outlying farmers could gather and barter with one another.

I've always wanted to expand on the islands as well, to add depth to Forest Haven and Dragon Roost. I can imagine an immense cave system and a vast housing sector for the Rito, and an easier way for them to reach Valoo. It's a dream of mine.

But that's why this rp is here. Everything needs to be expanded to fit the 200-odd accounts.

I make things bigger too. Just makes the world seem more... real to me, in a way. Not to mention that I change the dungeons Rian enters around a little, partly for story reasons, but mainly because I really don't want to memorize the layout of the dungeons or constantly reference maps in online guides because I'm wondering "was this room here in the games?"

No, I'll include the important rooms, but anything else is really up to what I think would fit the flow of the narrative better.

I've changed plenty. Such as the farm Ventus grew up on. And I added a little to Hyrule, I even addecd a secret room in the Mage's Tower library! I made my own house, that has a well in the basement, I mean that was weird. But now that I think about it, I could add more and make it bigger. And I added a formation of rocks in Hyrule field in my first post!

Edit: Oh, yeah I also added a kitchen to the Deku Temple which name is slipping by me. And a cafe mind you!