How do you fix a problem like fantasty?

As mentioned in my last post, one of the projects I’m working on is a fantasy world. Fantasy has always held a special place in my heart, though I don’t really know why. I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons, I’ve never read the Narnia series, never finished The Return of the King (though I got through the other two and the Hobbit, so I still deserve a medal) and never understood Warhammer. I have played World of Warcraft, but that was more recent.

I think my pull towards fantasy is a much more personal one. It isn’t the worlds that have been created by others that intrigued me, but rather their form. This is to say that their form is almost entirely up to the author. Want to tell the story of a war between the lion and the witch through four orphans? Sure. Make the most unassuming race the heroes of Middle Earth? Great!

However, it seems to me that at some point after tabletop gaming became all important in the fantasy world, authors stopped trying. Or, at least, they’ve made a concerted effort to make everything very similar. It makes sense, nobody is going to buy miniatures and cards and handbooks for games that have no dragons or dwarves, especially when so many familiars games are so entrenched as the giants of that industry.

To me, the best thing in fantasy recently has been the Nickelodeon show Avatar: The Last Airbender. Not to say that it’s better than Narnia or makes Warhammer look stupid, but at least it’s different.

So here’s my goal for fantasy: to have an original world from which I can derive many stories. I will create new races (I’m even considering removing the human race for the purposes of full originality), with a new mythos that does not come from any fantasy world before it, whether it’s the Christ myth or the Elder Gods of Azeroth.

My earliest conception was a world in which a powerful being (not sure who, why or how) comes to the world (name needed) and proclaims four words. Four brothers (I’m thinking this is where humans can be placed) hear the words and squabble between themselves as to which the all powerful being meant as the most important. This causes a rift between the brothers as they each pursue their word-based ideology. After thousands of years the descendants of the brothers have become separate races, each having used magics and science to help them better act according to their ideology. The words uttered are Justice, Freedom, Honour and Reason.

I have a number of ideas of twists that can be thrown into the four brothers myth and am thinking of throwing a fifth brother or a sister. To me the first thing I really need to some understanding of how beings that base their entire live on things like freedom and justice should look and how each would feel in relation to the others.

Let me know how derivative this is of other fantasy (as I’m sure I accidentally rehashed something from somewhere else), or if you have any design ideas that I can have.

Until next time, may the light embrace you.

~ by willdanceforideas on June 26, 2008.