Aug 16 (edited) • Assignments
[Eldara] Core Concept Workshop
I'm gonna go through the Core concept Workshop and post my answers here chapter by chapter.
Genre: High-Fantasy
Target Age Range: Young-adult and up
Word count: 37k+ and counting
Links:
- Story
- Worldbuilding (don't forget to check the comments too if you're interested)
- Fun facts/Prompt Answers
- Tone: Semi-serious, but hopeful, and, as far as I can make it, logical.
- Emotional Energy: There is definitely a lot of (semi-)suppressed anger in it, but for the most part, characters remain civil and try to hear eachother out.
- Metaphor: Here be dragons.
- Primary genre: High-Fantasy
- Additional genre-elements: cosmic horror, science fantasy, gaslamp-punk
There is a feeling of whimsy to Eldara, but if you dig deep enough, you'll find sinister and possibly even Lovecraftian elements buried under the world, and the sheer scope on which the gods operate can work as cosmic horror on its own. The story itself is much more concerned with the small picture, the immediate effects, and explores systemic and ideological issues, genocide, rebellion, and totalitarian oppression.
- Who should be the ones leading, planning, and/or acting out the actions of a rebellion?
The people involved all have their own agendas, which might collide at certain points. Resolving or sidelining these until a more stable solution is reached might be necessary.
- What happens when someone is left with nothing to lose, and an impossible enemy to defeat?
The inciting incident of my main story is the result of one man's mission to kill a god - a task that is not only definitionally impossible, but also drags everyone into more serious and high-stakes conflicts, not to speak of the god themself.
- How do you fix an inherently flawed system?
If a system is set up to make good people take up positions of leadership, and its works as designed, but there is still suffering and oppression, what can you do? You break the system and demand a new, better one.
There are two central conflicts which are disconnected from one-another:
- Political: The New Erigian Empire's ongoing genocide of magic users and Everwar with its neighbors.
- Personal: Ezon(the aforementioned broken man)'s quest to kill Nefest (the mad god in question).
The New Erigian Empire is a totalitarian, genocidal ethnostate whose central motivation is the Everwar; a perpetual conflict that will - according to their state religion - lead to them conquering everything over time. Individuality in such a system is highly discouraged, which magic users rely on to exist and function. They are also individually powerful enough to put a stop to the entire thing, so the Empire has been hunting them into extinction, forcibly making them fight for them on the frontlines, and treat them pretty badly in general, concealing the underlying genocidal intent with a kind of anti-magic purity statement. Magic users are living in fear, hiding, pretending not to be mages at all, or alternatively, actively fighting against the Empire.
Ezon has lost his entire family to Nefest, and wants to avenge himself on the god, working to remove them from the face of Eldara for good. Nefest, in turn, is a fragmented, splintered god, now locked into unending conflict with Ezon for survival. Nefest as a whole does not want to do anything with Ezon, but since one of their fragments acted against him, he's not stopping until all fragments are defeated, diminished, and as far as he can tell, killed.
It's an amalgamation of all of the various influences I've had over the years, the media I've consumed, the ideas I've had. At this point, I can fairly certainly say that no other person could have produced this exact world but me.
A general theme of my worldbuilding across all projects is that, when it comes to existing media, there are usually some parts I either don't like, want to change, or think could work another way. Eldara's a collection of a ton of these decisions, likes, dislikes, and changes. I can name most, if not all of my influences if asked, but Eldara is significantly different from all of them.
The story of Eldara is primarily plot-driven, growing organically out of the characters' actions in the setting and their individual situations. My primary motivator is telling my story to people, sharing it so they might understand me better through it.
Lately I've been focusing a lot of worldbuilding for Eldara, but it almost always came from a desire to give more context to the story rather than just enjoying building up the world (which I still do it's just not the main motivator).
A group of highly-powered magic users are dragged into the personal conflict between a broken man and a mad god, pursuing it around the globe, getting involved in local politics. Their own homeland in the meantime is in the process of civil war, fought over the oppression of magic users, from which all of their personal traumas stem.
I arrived at the name "Eldara" for a whole lot of reasons over the years:
- Sounds a bit like "Earth"
- Invokes a feeling of "Old"-ness, which it is
- Is welcoming, round-feeling, and motherly
- Also sounds a bit like "Arda", which may further remind you of LoTR, one of the major aesthetic inspirations
- One kind of god is called "Elders", and an alternative name for magic occasionally used throughout the world is "Eldritch". Together with [Arc contingency], i refer to them as "Project Eldritch".
I've been thinking about adding subtitles to the volumes of the planned trilogy, but for now, I only have "Eldara/Eldritch" to use as the story title.
- Purpose: For a story
- Big idea: strong magic users fight everyone to gain freedom and absolution
- Scale/Scope: a planet, but mostly focused on the Erigian basin and the characters' immediate surroundings
- Genre/Tone: Semi-Serious High-Fantasy
- Theme/Plot/Vibe: Plot-driven
- Pitch: mages get dragged into personal conflict while their homeland hunts for them
- Name: Eldara
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[Eldara] Core Concept Workshop
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