April Foundry - Wrapup!
This one sat in my drafts for a while as I recovered from Forge and caught up on Conlang Year. I haven't forgotten that I still owe the blog the last three days of the April Foundry challenge (which were completed in April! I just haven't posted them here yet). They're going to follow in this post, but first I'd also like to point you at a few of the other people who were participating.
Keladrea - a classic post-Golden Age setting, with elves and dwarves existing next to insect hives and other oddness
Drowned City - a technological city where society has failed. Its ruins are overrun by monsters and scavengers
The Realm - a Shadowdark setting straddling the line between dark and high fantasy
And, of course, links to the previous posts in my series - Week One, Week Two, Week Three, and Week Four.
April 28 - List one or more of your inspirations (film, TV, art, music, etc.) for your setting.
I actually have a google doc full of these and there are far too many to list here, so I’ll pick out a few important touchstones.
The most important, by far, is Bret Devereaux’s A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (acoup.blog), a blog that explores both ancient and medieval history and their intersection with pop culture. If any of those topics interest you at all, I highly encourage checking it out.
The look and feel of the ancient ruins in Switch Zelda games, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, are a big influence on the idea of the old empire and some of the way its visuals look in my head.
Trevor Culley’s History of Persia podcast has been important for how I think about politics and society in the Jewelsea. There’s a lot of interesting events and characters who I’ve filed the serial numbers off of and remixed to place in the greater region.
April 29 - In a paragraph or two, give an elevator pitch for your setting to a pretend reddit user looking for recommendations.
Fisher’s Island is a great setting if you’re looking for ancient fantasy, drawing on the rich history of ancient Mediterranean and Near East combined with a healthy appreciation for both classic pulp fantasy and more modern speculative fiction. The Jewelsea is a world of expansionist empires, fractious alliances of city states, and brutal internal disputes among local power players. Those who look deeper will find strange cults, eldritch secrets, and the mysteries of a vanished empire of clearly colossal power. There is wealth and power to be secured for those who have the prowess, cunning, and steel to contend with the monsters that hide in the dark corners that civilization cannot reach and bring back the treasures and wisdom that can be found in the lost places of the earth. Are you one of them?
April 30 - What have you learned about your creative process throughout this exercise?
Prompts are good at getting writing out of me - it’s also what’s driven me forward through Conlang Year. I’ve become very good at ideation over the last several years, filling a Field Notes-sized notebook with ideas about worldbuilding and game design every few weeks, but translating that into something more cogent has been a difficulty. It’s a thing I have to learn to do and it’s progressing in fits and starts. I think one of the things that I need to learn is how to prompt myself; to figure out how to generate the prompt that will unlock whatever it is that I need to write next.
Also, it’s way harder to do this when I’m caught up in playing a video game than it is when I’m not.
Conclusion
I had a lot of fun with this challenge, though it definitely ate up quite a bit of time in April. I keep a journal/commonplace book where I write a lot of game design and setting ideas, which I later collate into digital form. This was an excellent opportunity to put some of that to use - the setting document for the Jewelsea stretches over 500 pages of unorganized ideas and fragments at this point. This was my first bit of practice at getting them into a form that others can read and understand. There's going to be a lot of further work on that front. If there's anything you'd like to know about the Jewelsea, let me know!