Reactors, Kennas and Caloric Content

[Natai]

Reactors, Kennas and Caloric Content
Or How Worldbuiling Can Fry Your Brain

As I've written before, I'm trying to create a fairly plausible game world. Nothing too hyper-realistic, I just want everything to make logical sense, help with the suspension of disbelief, and make the world and characters come to life. I'm probably being a little overly ambitious in terms of the level of detail, but I thought I would give an example of how a lot of this design process is interconnected (and why this is taking so long).

I decided to design the currency used by Humans on Ortellum, the actual look of the bills and coins. While that was interesting and lead to developing some details in the game world, things didn't start to become interesting until I had to figure out a seemingly simple detail:
What denominations of currency did I actually need?

This seemingly simple question lead to my researching modern day nuclear reactors, hydroelectric power, the power usage of various appliances, the cost of electricity, the price of bread, numerous statistics on several countries, the diet of medieval peasants and their occupations, and the caloric content of a variety of foods.

As this was a rather long process and resulted in a two-part blog post (I hesitate to post the actual word count, for fear of discouraging would-be readers), I shamelessly direct you to the full posts at . If you've got questions or comments, post them wherever you like; here, there, everywhere.