I was very happy to see how many people were reminded of interesting other places from various media by my first scenes of Amad Tir's capital city Tassadawi. While looking for references and inspirations, I tried to find a style that would best fit the Bonfire Stars setting. Here's a breakdown!
The style I ended up with is supposed to work on three different layers:
On the surface, I tried to mimic a Victorian/neoclassical/roman-revival mix of styles. Think old London, mixed with the likes of Florence and Paris. The style of European capitals of the 19th century. I wanted to avoid big, shiny skyscrapers and the eccentric shapes of modern futuristic buildings, so this was a simple choice to go against the most common tropes. Beyond that, I hope this style evokes the wealth of old colonial empires. Cities full of temples, palaces, and so on, rich and old. Of course, we also associate these sorts of cities with industrialization, the late age of exploration, and the dawn of the first world war. All themes fit the sort of era the world of Amad Tir finds itself in.
More broadly, the historical style I copied here borrows a lot from ancient Greece and Rome. This was important to me to indicate what sort of empire/imperium there is in this setting. Naturally, "Imperium" in science fiction circles is mostly associated with Warhammer 40k. There, gothic spires immediately tell us that we're dealing with a late medieval kind of imperium, like the Holy Roman Empire: Ancient, stagnant, decaying, but also too vast and powerful to fall. The next biggest empire people might think of is probably the Galactic Empire, most resembling the modern 20th-century aspiration of a thousand-year Reich. That is also apparent from much of the big, grandiose architecture, big assembly plazas, and so on. With the architecture of Bonfire Stars borrowing so heavily from Greco-roman tradition, it sets us back to the roots. The Imperium here is neither a post-medieval husk nor a short-lived power fantasy, but something much more akin to the ancient, original imperium. That, with the first step's reference to empires like old France and Britain, makes for a much better comparison than either of the typical science fiction examples of empires.
Finally, the most obscure but also my favorite: Greco-Roman tradition itself is referential. The famous doric columns and ornaments repeated countlessly in temples and facades are like stone versions of tree trunks and the first primitive wooden structures. Marble Statues in stone, leaf ornaments, Doric columns – a lot of ancient architecture has very organic elements to it. And this, at its most basic, makes for a great reference to many of the organic/flora themes of the technology in the Bonfire Stars setting. Up to this point, this has mostly been hinted at by names and descriptions on the sector map, but it will become a broader theme before long. So, much like the most advanced technology of the setting, imperial architecture, too, resembles the organic world.
Is any of this essential or apparent? Probably not, and all of this is woefully overinterpreting a bunch of really very basic modeling assets. But still, I thought I keep a record of these ramblings. If I've already got the blog, I might as well use it!
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