World Building June Day 2: Geography
For this prompt, I’m going to talk about Kelovea and Exhumans. Quick summary: Kelovea has lots of dragons who hoard all sorts of different things, humans, and telepathic tentacle monsters, plus a few other races. Exhumans has humans, a small percentage of whom turn into various monsters.
The name Kelovea means “wide boat” in Vajo, the conlang I’ve created for the setting. And that’s how they imagine their world: as a wide boat floating on a vast ocean. Not too different from how some cultures on Earth have imagined this planet—but for Kelovea, it’s actually true.
Kelovea’s magic system runs off expectations. If everyone in the world thinks something works a particular way, that’s how it works. Everyone knows dragons can fly, so they can. Everyone knows humans can’t fly (unless they use magic to do it), so they can’t. Everyone knows the world is flat and floats on a giant boat, so it does. This can be used to develop magic spells: everyone knows that people who perform rituals can do magic, and then the exact ritual shapes the exact effect people would expect you to produce.
From my previous attempt to explain this:
Basically, the way one does magic in Kelovea is by convincing the universe that things should happen. You form a detailed, accurate mental image of how the world should look, and hold in your mind the utter conviction that it will be so. It is easier to convince the universe of things which other people have successfully convinced it of in the past with the same results. It is harder to convince the universe that something which has previously worked one way should work a different way. Human - and dragon - psychology also benefits from this, because it's easier to convince yourself that a spell you're casting will work if you just saw your teacher do it right in front of you. Because of this, several magical traditions have grown up and become codified on top of the basic framework. Every sapient species, due to quirks in their underlying psychology, has stumbled on different applications of magic, which are now believed to be inborn racial traits.
That got a little sidetracked from geography. Oh well. Here, have a map of the known world for Exhumans.
For scale, this is about the size of Europe. Rontignia (the little green island nation in the middle) is Britain-sized, and Torille (the turquoise country in the bottom right) is France-sized. There might be more landmasses elsewhere in the world but they haven’t been discovered yet, so Ihschlland (far left) is the most remote it’s possible to be.