Aelutea
702 A.E
Scope
The motivation behind building Aelutea
I want to get a handle of a world that I made myself, I want it to be expansive and something I can take pride in. Ideally I want this to become a job, I want to create things like this because it doesn't take math or science or other bullshit like that to create stories and characters and a world that's believable but takes you somewhere completely new. I want more than anything to be able to see these stories, characters and this world create an impact on other people and give them an emotional connection to it like I have with other stories I love.
The goal of the project
This world is very much an outlet for me to research and try to personify certain parts of history that interest me. From Germanic tales like Beowulf to coins and logistics in Constantinople during the 700s. Every part of this world is something that I am interested in and through that interest, I hope to incorporate history into something that people who don't necessarily find it interesting can find interesting through a fantasy setting.
Aelutea's Unique Selling point
The selling point for this world is it is very much built on real-world concepts and histories. Made by someone with a passion for history and education, I see this as a way to introduce some people to certain things about history that might not otherwise give a shit about it. For example, the Rasenna are very clearly modeled on the Romans but I want them to feel unique in their own way so I added many touches of more Byzantine aspects to them because Byzantium is an era of Roman history I feel is very underrepresented in media.
Back to the point, history is something that has a very big influence on how I want to construct this world. Things aren't just known omnisciently, they're known because in world accounts of them survive and detail them to the audiences that can reach them. The collapse of the world is known to everybody because it's very evident when you look around. However, certain aspects of the world before the collapse aren't as well known to certain groups of people due to region distance, class, or reading level. It's a world that I strive to make feel very lived-in, very pragmatic, historical, and very grounded in its approach to fantasy.
Back to the point, history is something that has a very big influence on how I want to construct this world. Things aren't just known omnisciently, they're known because in world accounts of them survive and detail them to the audiences that can reach them. The collapse of the world is known to everybody because it's very evident when you look around. However, certain aspects of the world before the collapse aren't as well known to certain groups of people due to region distance, class, or reading level. It's a world that I strive to make feel very lived-in, very pragmatic, historical, and very grounded in its approach to fantasy.
Theme
Genre
It's a low fantasy inspired by accounts of rulers, times, and ages, much of the world's history is really only known via oral history and histories compiled by scholars. The narratives created about the past use sources that are mostly biased in some way very similar to how history is known to us today. Low fantasy in that an age of "magic" was so long ago that nobody can really verify that it took place, stories of giants and almost biblical battles between early man and their rivals were passed on and sooner or later nobody could discern fact from fiction. Maybe it's all true, maybe it's all not or maybe it's somewhere in between like most things are. It's based very heavily on real-world history, narrative takes the shape of accounts and stories of people, places, and events much in the manner of how we understand history today. I would describe it as historical if that did not mean set in a real-world time period. People are complicated, emotional, and different. People should be smart enough to realize that people are complicated and trying to corral them into bad and good just sets expectations that aren't realistic with human behavior. I just want to create something that tries to discuss the fact that people are irrational, petty, dangerous and none of those things all at the same time and I hope that an audience can be smart enough to realize that when you write a character as a human being that they are going to be prone to making mistakes or acting in a way that sometimes doesn't make sense.
Reader Experience
The world is old, thousands of years ago, giants and humanity duked it out thousands of years ago and if you look for it you can see the scars that it left on the world. Cities rose from the bones of giants because their residual magic made crops grow well. This led mankind to achieve great things but mankind brought itself down because of greed, the Rasenna got greedy and didn't care for their empire and their enemies were greedy because they sought to destroy them without thinking of the consequences. The world got destroyed because of greed and for almost 500 years it's been on fire and bleeding because of the actions of a few people centuries before. Now you can find people huddling in between old ruins that sing songs of older times, burning old artifacts because they have more use as kindling than whatever they used to be intended for. Life is grim and things are beyond rough, bandits and would-be soldier kings run things and they don't have the time for setting up a forum and hearing about new ideas.
Reader Tone
Like darkness with a little flame at its center that won't be extinguished, things may be grim but they can only go up from here. If someone has a chance to save the world and make it better they have an obligation to. But the road isn't easy, the world is still dangerous and cruel, without punishment or consequences, people don't have to restrain themselves anymore and so dark aspects of the human mind can be on full display. The world itself is dangerous, with the Rasenna falling, magic rose from the dead and spread across the world again, sometimes this resulted in horrors people hadn't seen in a thousand years and sometimes it gave them hope that the next century would be better than the past. Old memories came to be, time became weak at the knees and ghosts from ages ago made their presence known off the shore and in the deep forests.
Recurring Themes
No matter the danger and no matter the cost, someone who can do go should do good. Moral ponderings are no good if they're not acted on. In the words of Marcus Aurelius, "Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one". Marius' actions in the ruined temple Dedros can't be redone, he has a mission given to him and has the luck to know how to save the world, now he has to accomplish it, whatever the cost because the alternative is the world loses a chance to save it and it might not get it again.
Character Agency
As the main character, Marius goes on his journey, the world lightens because more of it becomes clear. Life isn't as bad as he thought because of how little he'd seen of it. In Lakia the world ended but on the frontier not much changed except for the roads becoming more dangerous and creepy things happening that couldn't be explained. Marius finds friends and allies because of who he is, not what his destiny tells him he should be, they know the dangers of following him but they accept them because someone has to save the world.
Focus
Drama
The story begins in a ruined town, a place shadowed by decrepit monuments to older times. The story begins in Rasca, a town people think is where the Rasenna came from and home to Marius, a street kid and thief who lives a life just like everyone else. This changes when the kid stumbles on a temple thought to be worship nothing but cobwebs and old voices. The temple opens to the kid and reveals a destiny to him, an artifact that needs to be restored to its proper place in the far north and hopefully, will get the crops to grow like they did in the old days. The temple is also home to another slumbering beast, from the look of it, it came here to steal the artifact for whatever reason. It looks like nothing Marius has ever seen, grey and human looking, it's wearing some kind of vined crown and has an ashy beard and hair. When Marius takes the artifact from its pedestal, a voice tells him to run far away and to go north and look for a temple similar to this one. The voice stops and another replaces it, a voice like someone rising from bed in the morning and soon the ground quakes and the beast rises from its slump delirious but slowly coming to. Marius runs out of the temple in time as it collapses under its own weight and he keeps running as the ground keeps quaking until he's made it out of the town. Running farther and farther away across to the flowing hills where he hears a crash and decides to turn around to witness something terrifying. A giant figure, resembling the beast from the temple rises on two legs, dwarfing the town below him and begins burning with flame Marius has never seen before until he bursts with an inferno that decimates the town and reduces it to ash. There's no going back now, what did the first voice say? About going north until he came across another temple? Looks like that's what he has to do, certainly can't go back home now.