I often list writing as my primary hobby but while it’s certainly in my top two hobbies it has a rival. Worldbuilding. Most people who write fantasy will start with a plot idea and worldbuild just enough to make their world believable. Others – like JRR Tolkien – start with languages and worlds and the stories grow out of them. I am kinda in the middle on this, though leaning strongly towards Tolkien’s end of the spectrum (though I do not have his conlanging chops yet).

Some of my stories start out as story ideas and I create the world around it – though the initial idea rarely survives contact with the worldbuilding as I amend it so much as I build the world. Dragon Wars and Haventon Born both fall into this category.

Other times the seed of a setting appears out of the blue and I just have to build it and then as the world grows the characters and their stories appear. This is by far the more common way I get stories. Lawgiver’s Blade and Tales of the First are both this kind of story. So is Whisper to a degree because it started with Ishtar, the world of the Kska and Tkin, and its sulphuric acid seas and went from there (I am enamoured of alternative thalassogens and I do not care how unlikely they are).

It’s probably not a surprise, then, that I have far more worlds than stories.

So I thought that, instead of talking about the worlds that relate to my stories – which carries with it the risk of spoilers – I’d do a series where I show one of my seeds that has been sitting on my hard drive for a while waiting for me to develop it.

For today I will just be introducing it.

I call it the drying world and what I know so far is that over many millenia the following happened as a result of some sort of Supernatural disaster:

I made these maps in Fractal Terrains which is a useful piece of software that generates complete worlds from fractals. However you should take these with a grain of salt as I only every take the coastlines from Fractal Terrains and I usually amend them slightly as well. So next time (which may or may not be next Sunday as I go on holiday on the 17th August) I will show you how I start to make my own maps using the unfortunately named but free and open source GIMP and the not free but excellent Campaign Cartographer.

See you then.