Intro
Hi!
I'm worldbuilding for a fantasy setting I'm developing to write a story in.
It started out as a writing exercise. It's now complicated enough that I've got at least 50 pages of general backstory, a timeline, a conlang for the lingua franca, and a lot of time wasted spent on developing this world.
This Tumblr is basically a means to post my notes for this, both to organize my thoughts and also in case some poor fool aspiring reader discovers this rabbit hole.
So before I get into the complicated bits, let me introduce myself. I'm Womgi. I'm 33 years old as of 2024, and I'm an Indian citizen from the city of Kochi in India. I work in a housing finance company, which for our American friends basically means I work with mortgages. In my free time I dabble in fanfiction, and poetry. And I daydream of retirement because I'm also a millennial waiting for the proverbial mushroom cloud to sweep over me and put me out of my misery. English is actually my second language, my first being Malayalam, and my third being Hindi. I'm fluent in English and Malayalam, passable in Hindi, and I can understand Tamil if I squint.
Whit that done, let's move on to the actual setting!
So, short backstory time!
We have our basic fantasy magic world with people,magic and nations. Magic has existed basically forever, but actually using it was very difficult. Emphasis on was.
And back when magic was rarer than common sense, that's where your mages came in, people with enough magic to use magic in a meaningful manner, aka people who can cast at least some spells.
And then you have the real heavy hitters, the og legends in a time of sword and spear, the battle mages, who were basically able to use magic on themselves and become tiny unstoppable murder machines. Just saying, nothing says I win more than being strong, nigh invulnerable and super fast for a while. Especially when your opponents consider the spear and shield the height of military power.
The great nations of Trakia mostly came about due to these individuals, doing a lot of heavy lifting in "uniting" large areas into large nations. Thus you go from hundreds of small tribal territories to actual kingdoms and small empires, nations which have vast land, people and resources.
And the way these nations stayed united is that they figured out non mage magics, stuff that you could train the average guy to do. Basically, a mage might be able to light up a hand with their own magic. A magician would study and be able to do actually useful stuff, like a magic telegram, or repairing a house. But the point is, once you have communication in place, even if it is magic telegrams, you start to be able to consolidate in a way that you couldn't before the use of such magic. Communication allows for coordination, and homogenization, keeping a country together as opposed to having distant regions that will eventually feel estranged and eventually get ideas....like becoming independent. No, being united is all about a collective "us" that can then be used as an excuse to look down upon "them"
This is what I'd like to call the pre isekai period. When things were....okay-ish. sure you had your wars and fighting, but the world was nominally at peace, and most people didnt really have to worry about anything more than themselves and their immediate surroundings. Politics was something for rulers to worry about. Everyone was happy!
But everything changed when the fire nation attacked!
And then things....changed.