The past weeks I’ve been working on collecting notes about Enderra, the fantasy world. I’m going through my written material, all the way back to the first notes about the world, and gathering it all up in one document in an attempt to create a concise and definitive world book about Enderra. I’m at the point where I “only” have the notes about adventures from the Enderran Dungeons & Dragons campaigns left, and the Tales from Enderra. The Tales were a series of sword & sorcery fiction I wrote in circa 1995, and they’re about 50,000 words in total. The adventure notes are much shorter, but there’s still a lot of material in them.

Even so, I’ve reached a nice milestone today: The new Enderra World Book is just over 30,000 words long. And that’s just existing material, I added very few “new” things to it.

As a little sneak preview I thought I’d share the all-new work-in-progress Enderra map with you guys. This pushes the history of Enderra about 30-50 years into the future from the 1999 D&D campaign.

I expect to be done with gathering “old” material in about a week or two, and then I’ll start editing it. From the looks of it, Enderra will become my first World Book after all. I also have a tentative plan for the first additional book for the Enderra setting, but I won’t reveal this just yet. ;)

Stay tuned for more Enderran updates to come!

…you have to worry about it actually meaning something in another language. There was the anecdote of the car company – Volkswagen, I believe; but it does not matter – which tried to sell a car brand called “Nova” in Latin America. No Va meaning “doesn’t go” or even “doesn’t work” ruined their product for them.

Whether this story is true or not doesn’t matter any more than who made this mistake. It still means that any words you invents, especially names of important places like planets or your protagonist names – need to be checked on-line. Otherwise you may add just a little more humor to your setting than you’d like.

I guess I was lucky. One of our Turkish translators tells me that “enderra”, in Turkish, means “rare”.

I can live with that.

I spent a lot of my spare time working on maps. Here’s what I have to show for my effort.

First off, Thraeton now has mountain ranges. I experimented a little and came up with the following abstract style, which I like a lot.

Thraeton

Detail view:

Thraeton Detail

I am currently working on climate – wind, ocean currents, climate zones.

In between, I revisited that world which started it all, and which gave the name to this website: Enderra. I began by recreating what geography has already been established over the past 17 years. As you can see, this is not the entire planet just yet – the entire “new world” in the west was never mapped out, so it’ll be added later.

Enderra

I also experimented with drawing pretty national borders. These are very rough, and I’ll have to redraw them as the map evolved, but as a stylistic experiment I think it was quite a success:

Enderra National Borders

As always, I work in Inkscape.

I guess everybody has their favorite topics. For one, it may be dragons or juvenile wizards, for others it’s intergalactic smugglers and energy swords. For me, one of the most fascinating ideas is the existence of Parallel Universes. That is, the idea that there may be other worlds existing alongside our own.

I guess since everybody who stumbles across this, one way or the other, is probably rather well-versed in this now commonplace topic of fantasy and science-fiction stories, I don’t need to elaborate further. What makes the topic so fascinating, however, is that a Multiverse is not any longer something you’ll only find in fairy tales. There are many scientific theories and hypotheses that tackle the matter. Scientific, if you let me use the word for something currently untestable, because many very smart and very reasonable physicists are taking the matter serious.

So why do parallel universes hold such a great appeal to me?

First and foremost, it gives me a great cosmology to work with. I don’t have to fumble for any weird constructs like a divine creator; I’m using the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics to explain why the universe (or rather, the Multiverse) exists, and why things happen the way they happen, even if this is not necessarily how the “real” Multiverse works.

Secondly, it lets me get around the familiarity problem. No matter where on Earth I set a story, someone else will live there and know a lot more about it than I could find out through research or even visits. For example, in one story I have in mind, the protagonists would have to go on a bike trip through New England in the present time, that is 2008, or whatever the year. I am not sure anybody does that… especially local teenagers. No problem, I my version of New England, it’s all the rage.

Is it a cop-out? In a way. I’m throwing the audience (the players, the readers – who ever it may turn out to be) a huge hint about what’s going on (that is, that this is not “our” Earth) by having the foreign exchange student fly into Boston’s Logan Airport on the Pan Am 747 Clipper Princess of Mars. And I firmly believe that departing from “our” reality is fine as long as you can provide good explanations, and your reasons are consistent.

Finally, parallel worlds let me play with history or setting as I please. Need a world where the Nazis reign supreme in 2017? No problem, it’s a parallel world. Need a standard fantasy setting with dragons and wizards? Sure, another parallel universe where the laws of physics are just a little different. Need to have demons invade London or aliens showing up in North America? Why, they must be coming from a parallel world.

It is true that I don’t really need a cosmology to support stand-alone settings. But it also doesn’t hurt.

For example, my fantasy world Enderra was attacked by vicious demons in about 1992 (our year), which plunged Enderra into chaos and anarchy, and it took a thousand years for the people of Enderra to recover. This easily let me make many desired changes to the setting. Later, when I worked on Thraeton, I wondered how the natives may have learned magic. It was a simple matter to have wizards from Enderra travel to Thraeton during the Demon War. They didn’t stay – there was no demon presence on Thraeton – but they left behind knowledge of rudimentary magic.

Thus two of my settings became connected, and part of something bigger, and in my opinion they are both richer for it.

I’ve been world building for as long as I can remember. As a child I owned many Lego bricks, and built many imaginary worlds from them – often space-themed, but there were more “mundane” worlds. Later, in the 1980s, my mother got me my first role-playing game, and I was instantly hooked. I used the prefab settings for a long time, but built my own modules and campaigns. At the same time, I began to fiddle with writing fiction.

In 1992 – and I believe it was November – some friends and I wanted to start a fantasy campaign. The system was GURPS, and the setting… well. GURPS comes with a strange fantasy setting based on real-world religions. We didn’t own the world-book, and to be honest it would not have been to our taste. After a friend failed to come up with a decent setting, I took up the job of Game Master. I told the guy I’d have something ready in two weeks. In these two weeks I built a fantasy world I called “Enderra“.

Map of Old Enderra (pre-Demon War), circa 1992

The Enderra campaign ran at a very irregular schedule for several years and eventually died. In the late 90s, we decided to start playing again. I was again the GM. When I started to prepare for the game I quickly decided that I did not want to use any of the prefabricated worlds. But I also thought that building a new world from scratch would be wasteful. After all, I already had Enderra – there were many things about Enderra that I did not like anymore. So I fast-forwarded Enderra by a thousand years, and built on top of what already existed. The following D&D campaign ran for years, and a friend of mine actually ran his campaign using the same world.

The creation of “Enderra II” marked the point where I became interested in world building for its own sake. I drew immense enjoyment out of the creative act of designing a world, a whole universe, and over the years I built several settings of all kinds of flavors. Most of them never got used for anything.

Recently (late 2007, early 2008) I started to look for other world builders… to share experiences, to learn, and above all to have people to bounce ideas off of. This blog is part of that effort.