Penumbra: Building the World (Patreon)

Before I dig in:

1. I've been thinking a lot about worldbuilding lately. WORLDBUILDING. ~Worldbuilding~. Building worlds. That's a lie, I'm always thinking about it. I love doing it. It's the holy grail of creative work that I am forever pursuing. I constantly circle back to it in my free time, I try to carve out little niches for myself in existing game IPs where I've made original characters.

2. I'm also surrounded by extremely creative friends and one of those friends, (naming and shaming for practically 10 yrs of friendship) Magpie, has been batting Penumbra back and forth with me since last summer. I brought them the seed of this idea and they watered it. 

3. Worldbuilding is absolutely and totally meaningless unless you have a story to build for. Story informs everything. It provides the WHY to creative reasoning. 

4. Starting is hard. 

With that out of the way, this is where we started:

We knew we had a vibe, a feel, a genre that we wanted. Dark High Fantasy. Something crunchy to sink our teeth into and create the hard fiction we want to see, but without the yucky stuff that a lot of media likes to pack in because they think it makes a setting 'gritty'. But there are plenty of things to be scared of in fantasy without some of the real-world red flags.  With a tone we both loved in mind, the true starting place of Penumbra visuals was:

A web-generated map that Magpie brought to me after playing around with the tool. We decided it was the size of Australia. And like Australia, a lot of things are trying to kill you.

I went ham. I traced, I textured, I overlayed and filtered. 

And I thought, what if those dark parts of the world are no-man's-land? What if those places are twisted by natural magic with an inescapable effect like gravity? This is a world that has been hurt by magic, but its something that just can't be changed or fought by the average person. It's radiation, it's gravity, it's time and entropy. 

I do most of my thinking when I'm drawing. Being in that groove is like being on a train. As this map took shape certain points-- marked the little Xs-- caught my imagination. What happened to make them so intense? For the central region I latched onto the idea that this harsh zone of magical corruption was man-made, some wild by-product of magical misuse. I imagined a kingdom left in ruins and an entire country turned into a crater in the blink of an eye. 

Magpie carved up the map. They came back to me with names, borders, regions. I imagined climate, a divide, enormous mountains like the Himalayas that cut the continent in two.

I took to an old and enjoyable habit. In college, the last time I did any serious artistic worldbuilding of my own, I took up photo-bashing (mashing photographs and imagery to make something new) to create a landscape. This map was made by screenshotting regions of the Earth on Google Maps that I felt had interesting shapes and formations. The Himalayas take a starring roll, forming the spine of the landmass.

Australia also lends its iron-rich deserts to the Deadlands-- regions of this continent scarred and changed by magic. While believed to be inhospitable, these places don't wipe out all life. They change it beyond recognition. Beyond corrupted borders lie fantastical creatures, mutations, warped places and lost souls.

We tweaked some names. We solidified a few notions. The "Ruins of Vathe" (vayth) became Sainted Vathe, a region conquered through attrition by the powerful neighbouring Saintlands. The Saintlands became a matriarchy ruled by a queen revered as a saint, a woman some say can never die. 

Numerous free countries (that we may never hash out in detail, if we don't need to) and an Empire built on commerce and logistics. The peninsula country of Gaan (the Dutch word meaning 'to go, to travel, to move', as it happens) is a tropical maritime nation that has kept its land completely free of magic. Ossien's coast we decided was a region of bone and wilderness, the frontier of this world-- nothing beyond it is named or known.

And 'Silverark's Descent' became Silverark's Folly, a land that destroyed itself in the pursuit of magical power, and place whose legacy is silver-clad knights, hold tomes of knowledge and the wandering, heart-broken character, Galeas.

I took to the photo editor one more time and out came the world, a continent without a true and unified name. Only the one who conquers it all can choose how it is known-an unspoken law across every corner of the land.