Didn’t get around to doing this yesterday, so there’ll be two posts today to catch up. Rather than try to explain the whole history of any of my worlds, I decided to pick one single thing that exists in the present and try to explain how it came to be.

In Exhumans, there’s a country called Strantterra, which in the present day is a protectorate of the Bassentine Empire, and is named in Bassentian. Here’s a map showing the current political situation, which I linked a couple of days ago but might as well show again:

I’m going to take this prompt as an excuse to expand on what I mean by “Exhumans” and introduce some of the major exhuman characters. 

The central conceit of the Exhumans setting is that, while everyone in the setting is born human, some of them, under particular circumstances, can change into something else. Exhumans include witches, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, demons, phoenixes, dragons, and merfolk. All of these are extremely rare, ranging from only 1 living phoenix to between 20 and 50 witches across a continent the size of Europe. 

For this prompt, I’m going to talk about Kelovea and Exhumans. Quick summary: Kelovea has lots of dragons who hoard all sorts of different things, humans, and telepathic tentacle monsters, plus a few other races. Exhumans has humans, a small percentage of whom turn into various monsters. 

The name Kelovea means “wide boat” in Vajo, the conlang I’ve created for the setting. And that’s how they imagine their world: as a wide boat floating on a vast ocean. Not too different from how some cultures on Earth have imagined this planet—but for Kelovea, it’s actually true. 

Kelovea’s magic system runs off expectations. If everyone in the world thinks something works a particular way, that’s how it works. Everyone knows dragons can fly, so they can. Everyone knows humans can’t fly (unless they use magic to do it), so they can’t. Everyone knows the world is flat and floats on a giant boat, so it does. This can be used to develop magic spells: everyone knows that people who perform rituals can do magic, and then the exact ritual shapes the exact effect people would expect you to produce. 

From my previous attempt to explain this: 

Basically, the way one does magic in Kelovea is by convincing the universe that things should happen. You form a detailed, accurate mental image of how the world should look, and hold in your mind the utter conviction that it will be so.   It is easier to convince the universe of things which other people have successfully convinced it of in the past with the same results. It is harder to convince the universe that something which has previously worked one way should work a different way. Human - and dragon - psychology also benefits from this, because it's easier to convince yourself that a spell you're casting will work if you just saw your teacher do it right in front of you. Because of this, several magical traditions have grown up and become codified on top of the basic framework. Every sapient species, due to quirks in their underlying psychology, has stumbled on different applications of magic, which are now believed to be inborn racial traits. 

That got a little sidetracked from geography. Oh well. Here, have a map of the known world for Exhumans.