Wednesday World-building Workshop Part 2

Today’s lesson

Today we will be looking at an aspect of Worldbuilding that I needed to discover for myself. This will likely be the start to a mini-series within the WWW posts as there are just so many options.

This post will have to be a bit shorter than I would have liked because of the posts made tonight for the upcoming Zombie Survival Contest, Document Z on @writers-edge

I had the following idea when it came to looking at aerial photographs and Google Maps views of Cities. Because World of Kedra is a fantasy fiction, set in an age of swords and shields I needed to create cities and structures that follow suit.

If you look on Google Maps to any of the large European cities, you will note that the curves in streets follow the lay of the land. There will also be bent and misshapen buildings as structures were broken and rebuilt over many years.

In contrast new cities, especially like those in the United States have straight parallel roads. These cities were founded when technology allowed for the bulldozing of large tracks of land before settlement.

To be able to do the same thing in my own works, I developed a method of doing this in an organically growing sequence.

What is this? How does it help me? This it a layout of the Central Tower when it was first the only Tower that the Magi used. In this time all the Magi lived here, from the Acolytes to the High Magi. There were only the elements of Fire, Water, Wind and Earth and the Magi believed that a person with the magical gift is born with a single affinity in an Element. They were wrong...

The Method

Just like the “when I try to explain” meme, I post things on my walls and cupboard. It makes me more focused, invested and gives my brain something to have a look at every morning, even subconsciously. My family also get to know that dad is busy and serious about his writing stuff!

Instead of designing something in photoshop, I use paper cut outs and paste them to the wall. From here on I can change them over and over until I begin getting an image that I like.

This is the design I came up with at the end of an interminable period of time. I had to take this down when I moved house. Here it shows the 5 elemental Towers. It is too small to see this here but there are smaller Towers, connected by corridors or pathways. One of them is the Tower of Acolytes, which is my little Hogwarts. A 35 level building headed up by a single High Mage, her assistant and many more Magi. It houses around 300-400 Students at the timeline of Nations Under Siege.

Often this will begin at an imaginary starting point of a settlement and slowly grow outwards. I can even paste the paper buildings or parts of a massive structure on a day to day basis until it comes out authentic.

It also allows me to build parts of the timeline and use these images to write a history which I then expand using text.

Here we show a brief expanded view of how the elements moved out into their own Towers using the same locations they had before. An additional Tower was built for the affinity of Force, which is kinetic magic users. At the same time as Kinetic magic was discovered, it was also discovered that Magi could have more than one affinity.

Next time on Wednesday Worldbuilding Workshop

More detail will be given regarding the Towers and the parts that make them up.

More detail about Magic in the World of Kedra and how the systems for affinity is seen from a behind the scenes and in the scenes perspective.

I hope you enjoyed this post. Please leave a comment if you would like me to show more detail or more volume of information. Or if there is something that you are curious about.