if you’re doing some wbw today i’d love to know about what the worlds of a few of your wips are like. i saw in your intros you mentioned dark gunpowder fantasy & dark gas lamp fantasy & im very intrigued by it
Happy WBW!! Thank you very much for the ask! :) I'll give a brief descriptions of the settings of BCC and ITNOV then!
Bear Castle Cycle
This is my eternal project, which I have copious amounts of worldbuilding for so I will struggle to keep this brief :'D BCC is a gunpowder fantasy, the technology is roughly equivalent to the first Industrial Revolution, so late 18th to early 19th century, and dark fantasy with some horror elements there. The plot is mostly political, but there's also a bit of murder mystery and military fantasy. It's set in Mesian continent, mostly in the Angusian Empire, but less so to Dir'ahin too. Here's map of the whole continent and the zoomed in map for the Angusian Empire.
The base concept for Angusian Empire is what if Roman Empire, but it was the Napoleonic wars? There's guns but because they are not very good yet and for a lot of cultural reasons swords are still used a lot too. The general aesthetics are sort of Regency, but with more heavy Roman influence (it fits because Regency was very Roman influenced in the first place with all the Classicism being a big thing then).
There's magic, but it's not super present in everyday life in Angusian Empire, since it's highly restricted for the clergy. Magic is very volatile and can be very dangerous, since it's very much sentient. Spirits are magic and everything has a spirit. The spirits need to be reasoned with to channel them into a spell, but they can be fickle. They have a communicated with magically binding language, and you have to be very careful with the words when speaking with them. Doing magic is basically somewhere in the cross-section of poetry, legalese and trade. Because a spell is always a trade. The spirits require something back from their power. This is to say magic can be very dangerous and doing it wrong might get you or others killed or permanently soulless or possessed. In the official religion of the empire, they worship the sun and the earth, magic that doesn't draw from them is considered evil witchcraft. There's ghosts, demons, monsters and dragons, which are something between a spirit and a material body. Dragons are rare and very powerful and highly revered by the empire. They are considered to be the messengers of the sun and associated with the imperial family.
Angusian Empire is highly militaristic and industrializing at full force. The income differences are increasing especially in the provinces which is leading to political unrest. In Manoa, their biggest competitor, income inequality worsened by attempts to industrialize and keep with Angusian Empire led to a revolution, where the monarchy was overthrown in favour of a republic, and another war with Manoa seems increasingly likely. Dir'ahin is isolated nation, that doesn't follow the majority religion, practices magic much more openly and hasn't been in diplomatic relations with other nations for the past 150 years. It hasn't industrialized at all, but it makes up for that with much more advanced magic practices. In Dir'ahin there's also internal conflict between traditionalists who want to keep themselves isolated and reformists who want to bring industrialization to Dir'ahin and open the country.
The horror elements come from the magic. The dragons are basically powerful eldrich beings, there's body horror transformation/possession magic and the spirits tend to be pretty eldrich-like in general.
In the Name of Violence
In the Name of Violence is a gaslamp fantasy set in a city that's sort of like a Victorian London but in a Italian mafia story. Maeremin is a powerful merchant city state ruled by a merchant oligarchy. It's the center of world trade, a vibrant port city, but there's another Maeremin. Maeremin, that's ruled by the mafia, where you can't operate a factory without the approval and protection of the crime clans, where daemons roam the streets at night eating alive the beggars and drunkards unlucky enough to lack shelter, where the poor go days without seeing the sun. Maeremin is after all a city of illusions, world famous for it's illusionist artisans and booming illusion trade. Hiding the ugly underbelly under the beautiful surface. And above everything is the ever-watching god of sky with his countless eyes illuminating the night instead of stars.
There's three types of magic in ITNOV. Creation magic used by the nymphs, alchemy and divination. The nymphs are guardian spirits of nature and have the ability to create with magic, by molding life itself. Alchemy is a human attempt to imitate that creative process of nature, most closest it gets by illusion magic, which is works very similarly as the creation magic, except it's created with alchemy and can't change reality, only the perception of it. Divination is only achieved by connecting with Tino, the sky god, by eating it's flesh. Tino's many eyes see through time and space and by eating his divine flesh one can open an Eye of Tino in their forehead and see glimpses of the future. There's two types of divination magic, prophesy and prediction. Prophesy is only practiced by priests who can open multiple Eyes of Tino, while prediction is used by holy knights, who use prediction to see through illusions.
