#lore creation

Here I want to share some pictures and art I found over the web. None of this is mine. However, I’d love to start spreading the lore about their world and characters and maybe eventually, write fanfiction or even roleplay..!

Their name are Khn (the one with the long nose and blonde hair) and Klek (the one with eyes in his mouth)… They’re said to come from another planet, they are 333 years old, they love dice, pyramids and hot dogs.

Hello!

So, my approach to world-building is a little all over the place, upon reflection! 😅 I seem to take multiple approaches to the task.

What I generally lean towards is narrative-driven worldbuilding, for the most part, where the story itself drives the worldbuilding. There's a degree of constructive, top-down world-building involved as well, but that's more to provide a skeleton for a world that I can flesh out as I need to as I write (or as folks ask questions) rather than a step-by-step, minutiae-focused process for every little thing.

When the story itself isn't the driving force for my worldbuilding, I often find that I start with a question and work to create something that feels original, but also not completely unreasonable. It can be something like 'What kinds of foods do they eat, and how?' or it can be 'How does this society function in these conditions, and how have those adaptations affected how they see the rest of the world?'

Other times, ideas come to me after I've gotten distracted by something else - like learning about the dying traditions of fibre crafts and textile arts in the UK and the rest of Europe - and I decide to see if I can incorporate those ideas with the details I've already established. This is how the Artisan Guilds came to be, in part.

For things like culture and history... I don't believe that there's such a thing as a truly new and original story. All the stories that have ever and will ever be told already exist, in fractured bits, in history and in folklore and mythology. So, I turn to those things for inspiration. Often, real world history can serve as a useful framework for how a civilization might develop over time - positively and negatively.

Even just looking at a rough timeline of, say, Western civilization, you can start to modify it to your own writing purposes by asking yourself: what would I change? What would I add? What if X event never happened, or if Y event happened 200 years earlier? Even if you don't end up with anything really usable, it's a good exercise to get into the habit of!

Now, sometimes I draw more obviously on some aspects of real-world culture, such as the Bulreeng Taal festival and its very clear parallels to the Hindu holiday known as Holi, but whenever I do go that route I try to change it to fit my world and make it feel as properly alien as I can in whatever scene it features in. Am I always successful? Probably not - but it's still important to make the effort to make an idea your own rather than ripping it wholesale and just slapping a sticker on it.

To be perfectly honest, though? Sometimes I just go off of vibes. This isn't helpful for anyone hoping to learn from this, I know, but it's true! Sometimes, I'm writing and I'm in the groove. The words are spilling out onto the page, the story is flowing, everything is weaving together, and some random detail will get worked in that works really well with the scene - and suddenly I have a new thing to add to the lore.

It helps that I am, by nature, a lore hound. I love lore. I love learning about the lore behind a world or a character, be it a book or a movie or a game. I consume vast quantities of media in almost all formats and across genres, and my profound desire to learn more about some obscure apocryphal short novella vaguely related to something else I was learning about has led to me to places I wouldn't have gone with a taser, a Maglite, and a very large dog.

In consuming and absorbing so much lore, I think I've also managed to internalise some kind of... world-building wine barrel? Cheese cellar? It's not a perfect comparison, either way, but essentially raw, half-assed ideas go in, they sit and age, and I occasionally revisit them and turn them this way and that, and then I put them back in the barrel, maybe with something new thrown in. This can repeat a dozen times, easily. Vague notions and barely thought out plans slowly become more and more complex the longer I leave them, and then one day I check the barrel and there's a really good idea in there. (Give or take a few duds, but no one's perfect.)

And the thing is, my brain is always doing this. Always.

Regardless of how I come about an idea, I try to make sure all of my ideas are grounded in an imperfect reality, rather than creating something that requires an impossible utopia to exist. Universes like Star Trek tend to present this idealized future where all of humanity's problems are things of the past, even when they demonstrably aren't, and I actually find that distasteful as a writer. The world thrives on conflict. Societies and cultures grow in adversity. If you remove struggle, all you're left with is stagnation, and there's no place for a story in that kind of world.

Doux(sounds like doe, female deer), Yaultr(vault with a y, and teir) and Burmuda (like burmuda triangle)

Doux is a mid rank demon, Yaultr is a shadow creature and Burmuda is an aggressive spirit

Whilst wyverns are native to Nohr and its surrounding regions, not every breed is as common as the next. Hera, Camilla’s mount, belongs to one of the rarest: revenants. On average, their scales are of a darker colour than most, and are rarely considered good mounts. The reason for this is that whilst they are powerful, they are also fragile, so the overall advantage isn’t worth the effort of taming such a volatile breed.

The exception to this is an even rarer strain within their kind: undead revenants. They are far more formidable, as well as vicious. Their main flaw is the very thing that earned them a separate name.

Death.

Fertility is low in the breed, and usually no more than one egg is produced at a time. With how fragile they are, unborn revenants often use up all the strength in their tiny bodies simply attempting to hatch, and their hearts give out from over-exertion. However, they do not die immediately, under these conditions. Whilst they are incapable of movement, they can still feel and hear, though their eyes are closed for those few minutes before death takes them.

On the rare occasion, a revenant born to die may bond with something near it. Never its mother: they can sense a doomed egg, and soon abandon it. Should they form a bond with a truly living creature, they may sometimes open their eyes. Scholars have yet to discern the scientific reason why they are able to cheat death, though some theorise that such a young creature is capable of sensing a love towards it, and keeps fighting for that other creature’s sake.

A revenant that survives this process earns its undead title, due to its unique origins. As fully grown adults, they are far more difficult to kill than their peers, especially with magic. After all, how do you kill something without a heartbeat?

They still must eat and breathe as most creatures, and a beheading would work, though that method is difficult given how tough their skins are. Appearance wise, they look similar to their living kin though have the darkest of all wyvern scales, and a glowing nature in their eyes.

Still, of the revenants capable of such rebirth, even fewer make suitable mounts. First off, nearly all recorded cases show that they have been bound to another life, usually a human. Cold-hearted humans are unlikely to have formed a relationship in time, thus preventing the wyvern’s survival. A pacifist is unlikely to care for the creatures, as they have a reputation for being cruel, and playing with their prey.

Should somebody meet the right balance, they will have a hard time taming undead revenants. They feel an immense loyalty to their bonded, but as children they do not know their own strength: many loved by the wyvern may be killed once they reach the equivalent to teenage years, when all they wanted was to play with their human.

Camilla herself has had a few close calls with Hera on the revenant’s more enthusiastic days, and has a likely permanent scar on her right arm to show for it. Originally, she had attempted to hide it from her mother, but it turned out the woman didn’t care: if anything, it was a lesson to force Katerina’s gift into submission.

Eventually she tamed it, and has had no problems since Hera reached full maturity. Her temperament is rather tame for her race, only letting out their famous malignant nature upon Camilla’s permission.

When first hatched, the princess had no idea of the rumours surrounding the breed. She had spent every spare moment making sure the egg was safe and warm, so for her new wyvern to be seemingly stillborn was a tragedy to her, and was one of the rare moments she wept during her childhood, cradling its body. She had insisted on caring for the egg herself, so even before becoming a hatchling, Hera had been receiving her future mistress’ pure love.