Araea
Scope
The motivation behind building Araea
To have fun and write.
The start of Araea was nothing more than that, a challenge to myself to see if I could still write that has since gotten out of control in the best way possible. It is a loveletter to creative energies, and the joy of creating weird, wondrous, horrifying, and heroic things continue to be my motivation.
The goal of the project
Joy.
As time goes on, I hope to start a Patreon/Kofi so I can dedicate my full time to writing and creating, and maybe write somestories and games, too.
Araea's Unique Selling point
Araea is an inverse of many typical tropes. The Surface world was not destroyed by some great catastrophy - it's always been like that. Life does not originate from the sun and stars, but from deep within the core of the world, festering in the dark. Humans are the accidental discharge of an uncaring universe, but we carve out place out of the darkness with grit and determination. It's weird and wondrous, with a focus on how regular folk live daily lives in a irregular and extrordinary world.
Theme
Genre
Weird, dark age, fantasy
Reader Experience
The feel of Araea is one of terrifying wonder, about finding hope in darkness, and about the lowest low and most terrifying dark pitted against the indominable human spirit. And there's a lot of bugs, too, so probably a feeling of 'icky!'
Reader Tone
Araea is a world of wonder and horror and equal measure, a grimbright setting where the chips are stacked against humanity but we stack them right the hell back because we're a tenacious bunch. It's grey in its morality - there are few absolutes, just problems and solutions, people and their flaws.
Recurring Themes
Weirdness, hope, hopelessness, mundane life in alien circumstances, the evil of mankind against her own and the heights to which we can ascend when we work together. Horror and heroism, the bizarre and mysterious. Puns.
Character Agency
Everything can change. Even this post!
Focus
Drama
The exploration of unknown places
The struggles of survival against horrible odds
A brewing war
A secret history unfolding
Man against monster, or man as a monster
A knife flashes in the dark. An army crawls on its hands and knees through cramped tunnels. A terrible plague, long thought vanquished, reawakens. Ancient, blind things from the pit of the world mutate and twist the human interlopers in its lair, almost by accident. The sun rises over a blasted Surface horizon, and explorers brave the irradiated wasteland in search of whatever it is that lies beyond the horizon and on the spots of the map where it just says 'here br dragons'