About Daleth

Is this world too small we have to build new ones?
Or is it to large, so we build worlds to get together?
Yaghish, pondering Worldbuilding

I remember one day, way back in the 1970’s when I was at school, totally bored. I was about 7 or 8, and I guess Daleth started then, and there. It lurked a while in my mind and I didn’t do much with it. The world got its first outlinings in the early 1980’s, when I got bored in class at the Athenaeum. The first part of Daleth was the country Ciniz. But, designing a small country meant I had to make up some bordering countries, nations to interact with.
This way, Daleth was made; always looking for more information for Ciniz and its surrounding lands. The process still continues, the world is not finished yet. In the same way Trigohaima, Dernian Landis, Fanigawi and Luban were added, and more is to come.

As I work on Daleth by just thinking about it or writing the stories for it, I also work on the way the world looks, and tastes, and feels, and smells, and sounds. Some basic ideas are still the same after all those years, others have slightly changed.
Something that is already made, doesn’t really change; it can’t: it is related to so many other things the whole world around it would collapse. Therefore, I can’t leave too many “blancs” in this design. Daleth and its world are now a logic plan, something where all ropes have been tied together and where new ropes can be tied with them.

I used a lot of information for “the making of Daleth”. Of course, any basic education was included in the design, and then my specific education as a townplanner was added. When I needed specific information on a subject, I went to the public- or university library to read about it. By working on Daleth, I also worked on our own world, and tried to understand it - which is pretty difficult in many cases.

Daleth is not a mediaeval-like fantasyworld, although many mediaeval elements are put into it. It started out as a modern world, but I stripped it to a kind of Victorian, Gothic or Biedermeyer-world (it should give an echo from 19th century Europe). Many technical discoveries have been done and the Dalethian scientists are on the break of making more advances, developing more innovations. However, they do not always know what to do with it. For example, they do know gunpowder (kruit), but haven’t invented the cannon or the gun yet. They have (most of the time malfunctioning) steamengines, work on railroadplans, but never think about flying or gravity. Sewer- and watersystems are in almost every city, but bathing is still something for the upperclass.
Daleth is now a perfect world for steampunk-adventures, but can also be used for more standard-fantasy stories. It is a world, and like any world, lots of things are going on in it.

I started with Daleth by making notes next to my homework, and drawing little maps. The maps got bigger (up to A1 paintings), the texts grew as well. I usually wrote them down in pencil, until I got a PC. It is not easy to switch from static paper to interactive HTML, it is a totally different way of thinking.

Daleth is only a part of the world. I think the world is a sphere, not a disk, but the “back-side”, “flip-side” or “dark-side” of the world isn’t designed yet. The world hasn’t got a real name. I think our world doesn’t have a real name either. Probably the little green man on Mars don’t call that planet Mars, but something like “our place”. Therefore, this world will be known as THE WORLD OF DALETH on the Internet.
Only recently I designed a solar system for Daleth, thinking of a kind of galaxy to let it drift in, a universe... The Universe of Daleth? Might as well be our own universe, hyperlinked with wormholes in the forth and higher dimensions... hyperspace itself.... For more on this subject, read the Portals-section (or a good book on Hyperspace).

The name Daleth was given somewhere the mid-1980’s.
Ciniz, the first part, was a name simply given because it sounded cool, and had originally an v on top of the C, as they have in Czechia. However, my typewriter couldn’t cope with that. The word doesn’t actually mean anything, and if it does seem to mean something, it is coincidentally.
The name Daleth is the name of a Hebrew character ( ), which stands for both D as door (or window, or portal). The D is a door(-shaped character), and Daleth was a door-world; and it sounded good. When using other fonts, the th may be replaced with a “thorn”, a special character used in (old) northern European languages. (However, I pronounce it like a sharp t. The whole word is more or less pronounced as in Dutch: daaaalettt.)

I hope, one day I will have discovered most of this planet. Not all, for riddles and mysteries belong to life itself, and also to Daleth.