I’m immersed in a project that pretty much takes up all of my life. It’s difficult to justify it because, well, it’s fantasy. And despite my love for things fantasy and sci-fi I’ve found that there is that overarching super-ego societal nag in the back of my head that whispers something along the lines of “your work on fantasy holds no value,” and makes me look at my novel as “true art.”
Of course my ego and id say “fuck that” (well, the id says that, the ego is a little less crass). Anyone who’s read Ende’s The Neverending Story knows that fantasy is high art. In essence, I’m working on my battle against the Nothing.
The basic concept is that I want a world to play in. While I want to write stories set in this fantasy world I’ve discovered that I have a bit of a god-complex and need to create the entire world. This is not something that can be done in six days (well, and not be rushing things with quick fixes). First, of course, you have to figure out how big the planet is (which will let you approximate the gravity) as well as how far away the planet is from it’s sun (and the mass of its sun) in order to determine how long a “year” is for the planet.
Next, of course, comes a rough map of the world (note, all my maps have been made with CorelDraw 12, which I bought for $5.00, and I’ve only done quick and dirty screen-captures + cropping in order to post here). With a rough map, you can outline things like ocean currents (displayed below) and tectonic plates (not shone):
Here we have major continents labeled, as well as “Lands of the Old Empire”, and warm and cold (yellow and green respectively) ocean currents.
At this point you may be wondering, “it’s freakin’ fantasy, man! Why do you need all this?” My answer is that I want as real a world as I can make. There’s the concept in sci-fi writing that you should severely limit the impossible; introduce only one fantastic “thing”, like faster than light travel, then place everything else well within reality. Rod Serling even went so far as to say “fantasy is the impossible made probable. Science Fiction is the improbably made possible.” I’m a huge fan of Shadowrun, the whole “merging of magic and machine,” and I want to emulate this within my own setting; a solid basis in reality while adding the layer of magic. Also, because it’s fun. Starting on this project haphazardly some 10 years ago, dealing with the gravitational forces and periods of the planets, is what prompted me to get my physics (and history) degree.
So after the “basics” of the planet as a whole, I set about making a rough outline of the sentient species. Then I decided (as part of that super-ego complaining that there’s no use to doing all this) to incorporate the whole endeavor to be used as the setting of a role-playing game. Under the current version, I’m working on integrating it to Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition, but I had originally written up much of it to be used for the Hero System.
Once I had the world outline, and the sentient species outline, I decided to focus on one continent, which I named Khormadal. This is basically where I currently am at in the process. It’s tedious because saving the enormous map file of the continent takes about 1 minute and I need to save after every time I add a label to a geographic feature or insert a town…otherwise the program crashes on me. Here’s the map of Kormadal as of today:
Of course, this is just a screen capture (and for some reason WordPress is elongating the image, even though I’ve double checked the settings, so I’m reducing the size by an additional 80% and it looks “more” accurate), so the individual labels are only black or while blobs that somewhat resemble text in this image. Taking a more detailed screen-capture of the northern region of the continent gives us this:
The yellow, red, and other colored lines are tribal and national borders of the various species, which aren’t going to be present in the final version (which I plan on sending to cafe press to print poster size, natch). I’ve put the national boundaries into one layer (originally drawn in a previous save of the file, then saved the borders as a png image, and overlaid it onto the master file so as to reduce total file size) which can be “unseen” with a click:
But even still, it’s difficult to make out the names of areas, so here is a blow up of the center coastal region:
As I’m filling in the map, I’m writing the history of the continent. It’s a very simple history; ”
[Date] These tribes expanded into this region.
[Date] This kingdom invades this region.
Which gives me a flow of the various cultures. In a separate, simple-version, map of the continent I have layers for each species for specific, but arbitrary, points in the history of the world (starting around -20,000 EF to about 3,644 EF, where EF is “Empire Founding” for that “Lands of the Old Empire” Empire on the world map. From -20K EF to -5K EF I move in 5,000 year increments, and then have layers in about 800 year increments to 3,644 which is the “current era”). This way, I can look at the older increment layer and determine where the species migrate to for the next increment. Below shows the difference in locations of the species from 1,300 EF to 2,000 EF:
It’s difficult to tell in the actual CorelDraw file, let alone this screen-capture, how the layers interact. And I’m often toggling between two adjacent layers to see how they change. Take the bottom left region of Purple, light purple, red, with a small area of pink on the left and orange on the right. The light purple is where the 2,000 EF purple “invades” the 1,300 EF layer of red.
For each of these region changes for the species, I have to add the date and description in the main history file; which is times new roman font size 10, and 23 pages long for the full history. But after the full history I include the specific dates for each of the species-tribes/kingdoms, so the word document is 82 total pages long (and I still need to complete the history from about 2,000 EF to 3,644 EF).
Now when I say “cultural group x expands into region y” I have to look at the current-time map, see who currently occupies that region, and then decide how that current culture has named that region. For the north-central humans it’s fairly easy as I’ve decided that their language is translated into English. But for the other cultures, I need to craft their languages, the grammatical structure as well as individual words. Then, once I decide on how the current-culture names the region/geographical feature, I enter it into the Geography word file (which is currently just a list of the names and their translations). Take this region for example:
The Goldosh culture inhabits the area on the left and top of the image, the Hegeni on the lower right, and the Izulen (name not shown) inhabit most of the mountains on the right.
“Neggaulash” in the Goldosh’s language means Salt Desert, and the name of the lake in the top center is “Seknegumat”, which means Bitter-salt Lake. “Neg” is the Goldosh’s word for salt and appears in both words. “sek” is the word for bitter, “umat” is their word for lake, and “gaulash” is the word for desert.
The language-words and grammatical structure of the languages are kept in an excel file, while the geography, and a glossary file, are saved in word.
There is a heavy accent on specie-separation. In many fantasy settings, species are integrated. Dwarves living with humans living with elves and so on. In conceiving of this world, I thought to myself, with all the separation and ostracizing of different racial groups just among humans in the real world…what would a world be like with multiple sentient species. Given humanity as the baseline, it’s hard to imagine a realistic world in which heavy demonizing of the “other” does not occur, especially when that “other” is an entirely separate species in capable of cross-breeding; if humans are so capable of committing atrocities against other humans, then the bar would be even lower when confronted with other species.
And yet, humanity is capable of profound acts of life-empowerment, and so as the centuries pass in this fantasy world the barriers between species, like the atrocious arbitrary barriers between the “races” in this world, slowly break down.
As a final note; to say that I’m not heavily influenced by my years of playing Dungeons & Dragons (and Tolkien) would be, well, a lie. In developing this world for a role-playing game campaign setting I’ve used orcs, goblins, dwarves, and elves as some of the different species with the specific aim to make it “playable.” But once I begin writing stories set in this fantasy world, I’m not sure I will be using the “standard” species…but it does allow for an easier access to the world by the reader when one says “elves” rather than a new, made-up, name for a species that shares similar traits/ideologies to classical-fantasy elves.
