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The Makings of Felrani

(or How to Fall off the Edge of the World Without Really Trying)

How to Create a World?

This question beguiles most fantasy and sci-fi writers sometime in their career. Creating a world allows the writer to experience a god-like sensation which can only be achieved by creating and annihilating vast populations. This is partly the reason why civilization simulation games are so popular. Oh to be in control of your people's economic, social, spiritual, and especially military growth. As the sub-title of this article suggests, it is also an area that can pull the novel apart rather than cement it together. To understand how to create a world we need to remember that a population concerns people's lives. There's no point

creating a world without fostering a desire to know and understand these people. Everybody lives a life governed by universal factors, such as history, culture, environment. These in turn are controlled by other less mutable factors, such as the physical constants which rule their planet. Gravity always pulls down to the Earth, fire consumes, magic requires energy, space is silent. Constants such as these effect the everyday life of everybody. This applies to created worlds as well, universal factors affect their people to the same overwhelming extent.

What follows is not a definitive guide to creating a world, or universe of your own, it is a history of how I've created my world. The thought processes that developed the World of Felrani and its peoples and how, even eighteen years after I started the process, Felrani is still being created.

In the Beginning there was a......Doodle!

Curiously enough Felrani began as a doodle. I was eighteen at the time, thinking of my latest idea for a novel, a tale of a wizard who unwillingly became a king. I had to do a long run on the photocopier, which meant sitting beside the highly sophisticated machine for several hours, occasionally feeding it paper and unblocking it. So I occupied myself, as is my wont, by doodling.

Then it struck me that a particularly odd doodle looked interesting enough to make into a continent. A bit more here a little less there, and with the photocopier nearby, enlarging it a few times finally gave me a land that I thought looked suitably fascinating enough to populate

Just out of interest I did a few more, resulting in a selection of seven continents and a few of what would turnout to be small but very important islands.

Terraforming Felrani

Normally at this stage I would have drawn in a few rivers, mountains, swamps etc. and called that it. At the time though I was studying a degree level unit in earth sciences. This course opened up my mind to the fact that surface terrain is much more affected by its relative position to the sun and other factors than I realised.