I’ve been interested in world building for a long time. It started off as a general desire to understand how the world worked and has evolved over time. I intend this blog to be a place where I keep notes about my exploration of world building. The name, Honua, comes from a Hawai’ian word that I translated as land.
I’m old enough to remember when Traveller’s Icosahedron Maps were the thing, where planetary climate mapping, as per The World Tamer’s Handbook, was something that could be done with reasonable ease, though the math of trying to figure out how to maximize jungle terrain type was still a persnickety thing.
One of the artifacts of the distortion of the Icosahedron is that there are tears in the map. Focusing on a planet with less land area and more water would offer a better and “realistic” way to avoid these points that come together. Combine that with a fascination borne from reading Tom Clancy novels for naval operations, this seemed like the perfect sci-fi setting: A world where the idea of every nation getting an English Channel was baked in. We wouldn’t have to worry about the non-sense of large scale land warfare and could focus on the clean and high tech world of sci-fi naval combat unencumbered by the real world changing. That was arrogance.
These ideas got a lot of expression and different ideas being tested out. Honua itself as the name and idea came later. Besides Tom Clancy, another writer that I read a lot of was David Weber. I got to be part of the BuNine group that worked for awhile supporting his work with technical support. One question that came up for me was what would the habitability of stars around binary star systems look like. That question is complex enough to answer on it’s own due due to the differing angles that the light is intersecting the planet as well as the different wavelengths of light. as far as I know as of 2025 neither ROCKE-3D nor ExoPlaSim have the ability to handle this. But there are fudges to make it work well enough to interest me.
I’m choosing the term multipotentialite to describe myself for this blog. I’ve knocked around different forms of expression and I’m still trying to figure out pretty much everything. My latest hobby has been miniature painting. I’ve done the standard Space Marine (Ultra Marine, of course), noodled around with my own Space Marine Chapter (the Storm Breakers of Aetheria) and supported a plethora of STL creators on Patreon.
The miniature above is the Outworlds Mangrove, a STL I’d purchased some time ago and recently painted as a lark. I enjoyed the process (which I don’t think is finished) more than some of the more traditional minis that I’ve painted, mostly Star Wars: Legion scaled (1:48).
I watched a video about content creation that talks about sharing the creative process and that no one is going to care about the work until it’s pretty far along. With that in mind I’m trying to present more outward facing accounting of what I’m doing in world building, which is going to range from using Bios: Megafauna 2nd Edition to create plants and animal species for Honua to using ExoPlaSim to generate a better understanding of how the climate works on a highly eccentric type-S binary orbit and a whole lot in between.
Looking at the plant I understood that the alien nature of the world was what I wanted to explore and express. I look forward to sharing more of the journey here and perhaps sheading some light for others who are interested in world building too. And to recognize those wonderful souls that have encouraged, enabled and supported this project.
Honua 