I have been considering making this blog post for a while now, and I figure it’s about time.

For me, one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing fantasy fiction has always been the creation of the setting. Anyone who knows me at all knows this, but most probably don’t know why I made the setting of Ahldir the way I did. Me being a fledgling author, most of you probably wouldn’t care either. Still, I bet nearly every fantasy fiction writer out there would love to talk about the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ behind their world. And since this is my space to talk about the shit I like to talk about, I’m going to give you my own ‘hows’ and ‘whys’. Maybe the answers to these questions will help some other fledgling fantasy fiction writer out there make his own decisions. Not that I think my answers might be inspiring, but maybe they’ll help others make their own setting choices with more confidence.

If there is one thing I can tell you before some of you become bored and stop reading, it is this:

Create your world with authority. No matter the choices, be confident. Until you unleash your setting upon your readers, you can always make changes. Hell, anything you haven’t shown the readers yet can be changed. In world creation you get to be a god. Have fun with it.

Now, if you’re interested, stick around and see how Ahldir ended up the way it did.

Let’s start back when I was 11 years old. I made friends with another kid by the name of Sean. He spelled his name totally wrong, but he did introduce me to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Actually we were best friends for years, and I owe him a lot. It’s a total cliché, but without Sean I wouldn’t be where I am today. I wouldn’t be who I am today. AD&D changed my life. I won’t get into the finer points of how this was, but I’m sure it’s a similar story to that of many kids who found their way to the game. Suffice it to say I’ve played a lot since then, but my favorite moments began a year after I learned to play, when I started DMing. (That’s “Dungeon Mastering,” for those of you uninitiated into the murky cabal that is D&D.)

I think I found out about my desire to write the year before Sean introduced me to the awesomeness that is RPGs, but the day 11-year old me played AD&D for the first time, I knew what genre it was I’d be writing in. Fantasy fiction was just badass!

I can create an entire world out of nothing and then let real people run around in it? Yup. That’s for me.

Fast forward 25 years. In 2015 I moved to Florida from Massachusetts and finally had the peace and environment I needed to write in seriousness. So I started building a new setting. I put together a handful of notes but got caught up in the desire to get started on the actual novel writing part. I got 157,000 words of novel down and decided that something was off. The story wasn’t what I wanted it to be, but it was the setting that really bothered me. There were parts of the world I was happy about, but it needed… more.

More what? More of a lot of things.

First off, I wanted a world with history, and not just the typical “we had a catastrophe a long time ago, now shit’s fucked up, here’s a story” kind of history. I wanted layers. A golden age? Sure, I like that. A fall from grace and a cataclysmic extinction event? Yup, I want that too. How about we have the fallout from that extinction event lead to thousands of years of war, hunger, plague and other fun things? Yes-yes-yes! Then civilization manages to climb out of its dark age–can’t last forever, right? Oh, wait! Now that they’ve started to find their footing, can we pull the rug out from under them with another cataclysmic event? But this one is of their own making! Oh hells yeah!

Layers, people. Layers. I guess that’s my underlying theme. And layers = a lot of depth. Much like our own world, I wanted people to be passionate about causes they only marginally understand. To the characters, motives may appear clear-cut, pure, completely just, but the reality is they probably don’t know the origin of their own cause, nor the true agenda of those spearheading it. Hell, even the people spearheading the causes and leading the power groups of Ahldir are usually serving more than one agenda at a time, generally without realizing it. Some groups were even founded based upon inaccurate information, yet these same groups have influenced events of the world based upon their false assumptions.

Like I said: Layers. Layers and lies. And all this is not simply done for the sake of complexity, but rather for a level of realism I don’t generally see in fantasy fiction settings. A layered world will lead to well thought out characters whose own histories will be filled with things that bring them into conflict with the world they exist within. Organic conflict in this case, as characters will have likes, dislikes, morals (or lack thereof), and prejudices based upon specific aspects of Ahldir. This was important to me as I developed the world, and the farther I got in the creation process, the more I liked what was coming together.

Lastly, I wanted a setting I could write through different eras of its history, with each past era being responsible for some (or a great deal) of what the readers experience in more “recent” eras. Even still, I developed the history in such a way that readers can fully enjoy stories of the “present” without having to read stories of the “past” and vice versa. Of course, those who read tales from all the eras will likely find a great deal more satisfaction as they come to appreciate the events that occur wherever history’s ripples bump into one another.

Ahldir is my most profound creation to date, and it isn’t done. Not by a long shot. The Soul of the Blade, a standalone novel currently divided into a series of shorts, is my first undertaking in the setting, and even that isn’t done yet. Hopefully that’ll be published by March of 2021. After that I’m on to writing Ahldir’s first full-on series of novels: The Elrathir Cycle. I can’t even begin to tell you how badly I want to get started on that beast, but… one thing at a time.

At least now some of you will have an appreciation for what it is I was trying to accomplish with this setting. So far I’d say I’m doing what I set out to do. Hopefully some of you will feel the same.

Peace, all!