Building Fantasy Worlds

A World borne of fiction, fantasy and magic (c) The Caribbean Yogi @thecaribyogi

It’s easy to say you want to create a world, to play ‘God’, it’s another thing to actually do it. I’ve spent the last four months building the world for my upcoming epic fantasy fiction series #guardianspiritsofelysia and I’m still far from finished. As they always say, the devil is in the details but I didn’t expect the devil to be so strong. Up at 2am in the morning trying to figure out what is the best way to orient your fictional mountain range and then two hours later eventually falling asleep when the sun cracks over the horizon. After the first month, you send a sketch to the artist and have them return the image below, you then swell with pride and immediately believe you are ready to roll with the Tolkien fans and artists the world over. Until you see the map of middle earth.

It is truly impressive to discern the level of detail expressed in the Map of Middle Earth and how the story of the unassuming Frodo Baggins moved from the North to the South to the Mount Doom of Mordor. The dreams aren’t any less vibrant, a lot of the names for the places came from television or books or dreams. The end product being a hodgepodge of gibberish that makes sense only to you as the writer, and you then muster the courage to place the details on the map and feel you are complete, then comes the high school geography again to torture your very soul .

Apparently Mountain ranges are formed by subduction and generally oppose the direction of the main trade winds, in the case of Trinidad in the Caribbean (and Elysia) that is the North East Trade winds. Unfortunately, I fell asleep in high school geography class, taking in only the bare minimum and discarding the rest, so that added one month to my map making journey. I now had to study how subduction and wind currents work before developing a base image of what the final land mass will look like. High school physics helped here with identifying locations where this fictional planet located in our Universe as Sirius C(https://www.drewexmachina.com/2017/04/06/new-hubble-observations-of-the-sirius-system/) which would experience temperature differences and consequently wind currents in a dominant direction. I was hoping it doesn’t resemble a Pangea rip-off too much and gave me the space I need to work with in order to develop a truly epic fantasy.

Then popped my sad attempt at building a base land mass.

It thankfully got better though, with the able hands of World builders and MMORPG game fans from around the world, I was able to develop a shape that makes sense, a map more complex and deep than Middle Earth, and the grounding theories of physics and geology that would make my high school teachers proud!! Here's a look at the first sketch draft before we started to delve into the specifics and theories governing fiction fantasy over the ages before adding the magic ingredients of sorcery, dragons and mythologies from major world races such as Norse, Egyptian, Ghanaian, Indian, Hungarian, Scotland and of course the Caribbean. Look out for Part 2 coming up in a few weeks !!!