Waking To Dragons And Elves -1 Authors Thoughts About The World.

The collection of heavens.

Maphere is a world that has been in development for multiple uses, for around 8 years so far. It didn't originally start off as a world for writing stories but as a school project.

I decided for english cla.s.ses, as I wasn't that good at them, that when we did creative writing, or writing based on a phrase, I would incorporate it into the same story-line, with the same characters, learning more as they explored these numerous places.

This developed over many years, where I'd write dialogues between different characters, keeping the main character and having someone random interrogate them as they travelled in a cart with the main character chained up.

Or where two main characters found themselves inside a haunted house and had to solve the puzzle around the death of the owner to leave.

This ma.s.sive number of concepts which involved the same few characters, started to cause contingency problems if I was to write anything solid. That was till I started playing, and running D&D; dungeons and dragons where I took my world-building to a realistic and large scale, reworking economy of cities and adding numerous bits of detail I would never have thought to include.

But D&D helped me with the one thing I needed, a way to combine multiple 'worlds'. This was in the form of planes by the spell 'planar shift'. A spell that allows people to travel between the countless number of 'worlds' that could exist. Which lead me into making a specific character who had the power to bring all those people together into one world. [It would be a spoiler to the person here]

That character allowed me an in lore way to combine different worlds, and in the process lead me to treat the existence of Maphere, as a parallel world. This is referred to a lot by the 'lost worlds' even within my own lore.

Treating this whole world as a real place has lead me into many places I never thought to find myself.

I have spreadsheets for ores and blacksmithing, price lists and research for fish and other creatures. I even researched into crop growth and growing times just to get everything right, to get the correct scale and development of everything I could.

This also means that there are multiple 'conlangs'; constructed languages, I have built into the world; but a year ago my original draft of Chapter 1 involved too much text being impossible to understand. I felt it was needed to have the language be visible causing a large part of the chapter to be unreadable unless someone took time to later look back to translate.

At a later date I will involve a few words from Necin which is a language in this world, the most common one the Jual uses. Jual being their language equivalent for something 'close enough' to human.