xli - Day 12 - In what story did you feel you did the best job of world-building?

No contest, it has to be my first novel, the fantasy I wrote several years ago. Before even recording my characters' first steps, I'd already taken weeks upon weeks building the world they were going to travel.

I once heard a joke that fantasy stories always seem to start with the author scribbling a map. I'm not sure if it's true, but my first novel definitely did. It started as a rough outline of continents, and then piece by piece I added elements. Based on (admittedly very high level) research about Earth, I sketched out tectonic plates and the corresponding mountain ranges. Then currents, both air and water, based on which I extrapolated climate. I spent a few weeks immersed in atlases, sifting through temperature and precipitation charts.

With the broader geographic strokes taken care of, I moved on to populating the world. Plants would correspond to earth equivalents, with regions reminiscent of Northern Europe having vegetation much like the vegetation of, you guessed it, Northern Europe. I've also heard a joke that fantasy is like science fiction but with trees instead of space ships. Granted, there are definitely more trees (lots) in my story than ships (none), but it's not a story about trees, so if it walks like a maple and talks like a maple, I may as well just call it a maple and tell you all about the character that got shot by a crossbow next to it, instead.

Animals followed the same reasoning, though with more room for improvisation. A few made-up beasts roamed the pages, creatures conceived with plausibility in mind. At some point in the late eighties or nineties someone in Hollywood decided to rationalize how dragons could exist and that approach to fantasy wildlife stuck with me.

The cultures started off as small tribes, one chosen by each of the seven deities. From that point I charted their evolution and expansion, noting the major events in each culture's history that would influence its progression and shape its interaction with its neighbours. Their means of dress and methods of subsistance were drawn from cultures from across our own globe. Then, their relationship to the supernatural, their gods, and most importantly, their view of magic.

Strangely, the only concept I hadn't fleshed out completely was the nature of magic, how it functioned. I knew how everything was tied back to the magical forces in the world, but I hadn't decided on how it was going to be manipulated, but that started coming to me as the story progressed.