Since this week is the Major Update week, I don't really want to go into technical details in this blog entry, so instead I would like to talk about the world-building for a bit. I am a bit of a world-building fanatic, but not in a way that I like to come up with things, facts, events or places that have nothing to do with the events of the story. Some people like to write down tomes about the world that their story is set in, write historical epics and draw maps of distant regions. That's not me. I like to come up with as little as I can. Being concise is my jam. But it is paramount to me that everything I do come up with makes absolute sense in-universe. So coming up with the world of Under Your Spell was a doozy, and even now it is still a work in progress, of course. We wanted the world that would make sense in the world that we live in right now, right off-the bat, Shady Two and I faced such questions as:

Why don't modern people know about the world of wizards? How come are the encounters with magic creature are so rare (or even non-existent)? Why don't wizards use tech? How does wizard economy work? How is wizard society organized and what is their cultural identity if they are segregated from the society of the normies? How does wizard culture differ in different regions? The list goes on and on.

Of course, some of these can be hand-waved as "magic" or "mind wipes by wizards". But not only does this feel cheap to me, but also raises even more questions to motivations and organization of the society of mages.

So we spent many hours with Shady Two, asking each other questions and trying to answer them to each other. Shady Two not only being a great artist, but also a much bigger folklore and mythology buff than I am, was a great help with both finding the gaps in logic and finding ways of filling them.

Now it was just a simple question of delivering this information to the players without resorting to info-dumps. Easy peasy Japanesey. Right? Ehh... Who can say? I did try my best to fill the events with little facts and snippets of lore here and there, and of course the main plot and girl-related event all delve into one aspect of magical world or another, so hopefully the jigsaw puzzle of info will for into a nice and pretty picture for the players after a while. At least, that what I am hoping for.

But until we have all of the pieces on the table, I hope that the new stories of Elizabeth and Ciara would shed a bit more lite on the world of magic and people that live in it.