#Lost Kingdoms | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

corvarrow · 27 days ago

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Alright guys it's now time for a very exciting worldbuilding post: SETTING MAPS!! There are several in this post so I hope you enjoy the ride and please feel free to ask me if anything catches your interest.

I will start this off by saying these are very basic, and I only marked off a couple points of interest, but I still think there is some fun stuff to talk about here. Due to the massive amount of info I am also just going to have to skip some background info. Additionally: this continent is the main setting, but there ARE at least two more. It's also huge, like comparable to at least North America in size, so please imagine there are a ton of additional features (such as rivers, lakes, additional biomes, settlements, etc) here that I just didn't mark off.

Above is the very general Ancient Era map and we are just going to get really note heavy from here. Not everything is fully named and may or may not be adjusted later. One final note before I start is there is a conlang involved. I also haven't fully translated everything but I think in this case that works in our favor, which we'll get to in a sec.

Here is the map of ancient world sentient cities and a couple pieces of information. The four* sentient cities are called Sovereigns, and they all have avatar bodies (their original sion bodies).

*Ahveph, their creator, has a "spot" but at this point it's not acting as a sentient city and it doesn't have an avatar

Their language does makes a distinction between them as a location and them as an entity when using the full name. When dealing with shorthand though the first section of the name gets used to refer to the entity and the second for the location. For example, with Fatewinder's Beacon, "Fatewinder" = entity and "The Beacon" = location. I do have the first sections translated into conlang so we'll also start using them in this post, so if you see the conlang name I'm now talking about entities and the English names are locations. By the way, Fatewinder is Akiyohm, or "(to) wind fate". His siblings are Kantalys (Kanta), Sennamet (Sen), and Tenemohr (Ten).

Worth noting here that the avatar bodies can travel, but they ARE "tethered" to their main city bodies. They can visit each other, but they can't go much farther than that, meaning they have been locked to this continent and the waters immediately around it.

What is also really important to know is that they do NOT look like normal cities. They are actually complex megastructures, though they contain all things you would expect in cities including transportation systems. These megastructures are also shaped differently from each other. The Beacon is in a desert and is mainly vertical - about 10% of it is above ground and the rest is under. The Reach is across a mountainside and is built at an angle with the most terracing of the lot. Rest is in some riverlands and is mainly horizontal. Haven is on some heavily forested karst landscape - it's also horizontal but it has less levels than Rest does because Kanta chose to stretch it out farther.

Next we have the original territory map. When they first started here, they got along fine, but eventually when they figured out they could influence other magic wells besides the ones they lived in, they had some issues with who got what well. Finally they decided to split this out into roughly equal pies and for a while they were fine with that.

Influencing the wells into certain magic types also causes the area around them to have a magic bias towards that type. For example most of Aki's wells are wind type, so his whole region tends to have wind magic and they can construct lots of windmills to take advantage of that. If they change territory lines then the wells in that area will change as well, though they won't change easily if the area is under war.

From here on out you can consider these pies to be Kingdoms, with the Sovereigns being their capitals, and the Sovereigns also being Actual sovereigns.

Ahveph's "spot" (Seat of the Creator) remains a neutral event ground for the entirety of ancient history.

Also on this map I can point out Sunbath, which is a major story location. It is a remote village that ended up on Aki's trading route. It is also where Jas happens to live.

So yeah they still could not fully agree on territories which led to multiple disputes and actual wars over the millennia, until they finally ended up with this around the peak. Kanta has the largest pie by far, then Sen, Ten, and finally Aki.

At peak pre-cataclysm, this civilization had gotten quite advanced, as in "farther in the future than Earth" and "how are we feeling about the vast reaches of space everyone" kind of advanced. The major difference is that sions wield magic, so most of their advancements were heavily magic based rather than using physical science. Anl quick example of what I mean by that would be like, batteries - although they could make electrochemical batteries like we use on earth, they would more likely make them using lightning magic instead.

Well things couldn't stay good forever. Events led to the cataclysm and caused the plane split - literally there now three different planes are stacked on top of each other and they are not exactly the same.

First is the original Reality plane, now called Time's End. This plane has become, to put it politely, completely fucked. Although plants like it, and there are some leftover constructs like corvafex, there aren't any people or animals anymore. It is blown out with magic and very few natural processes work like they are supposed to. The time of day is locked in bands by region (see next map), time flows inconsistently, and the weather and seasons don't cycle, they are locked at random by region. This doesn't mean things are entirely in stasis though - the tides still move, which is quite clear in places such as the inland sea, and the shore near the Glassworks. At The Beacon, which had already been near a dune field, Aki's wind towers have gone without maintenance for so long that they stir up huge sandstorms every so often like clockwork.

Technically, it is still possible to reach this plane. It's most easily reached by (modern) sions because mirrors do exist here, but it is desolate. Non-sions can occasionally end up here too, but with the resonance levels and time fuckery it is not advised to stay too long.

This map is just to show how the time of day is locked. So for example, the Seat of the Creator is in perpetual midday, the Beacon is stuck in the afternoon, Rest and the glassworks are still stuck in the morning, and the Reach is at night.

The second plane is the Memory plane. It is called this because there are copies of settlements (mostly from the new Reality) on this plane, but not actually anyone in them. The plane is actually empty, like nobody ever actually lived here, as opposed to Time's End where it is empty because everyone is dead. It still remains quite eerie to explore however. It's just tons and tons of ghost cities essentially. Most of these copies look fairly normal (if not just eerie), but not all of them as the Memory plane still contains some resonance. It's not nearly as bad as Time's End but there are some cases where you'll have like, an entire empty city permanently covered in glowing fog.

So as far as Ahveph goes - it is an entity integrated into the whole planet, and it COULD manipulate things where ever, it just chose to focus on the areas the ancient sions lived in. After the planes split it was almost completely immobilized except for this one location. It can still sorta see things but it cannot do shit unless it's here. What it has currently chosen to do is to act as a city and build modern sions to live in it. It's success at being a city like the Sovereigns is kind of debatable but to be fair it is really a different beast entirely anyway.

Named characters that actively live here are Cavi, Torch, Tower, and the Daydreamer. While it is mostly populated by sions it does sometimes allow non-sions as well, like Subore actually lives here. He is also is one of the only humans that has learned modern sionic.

This is also probably a good time to mention modern sions are fairly different from ancient sions. Ancients are all sapient automatons - they have A Process to build some more (there is in fact some "genealogy" and "genetics" involved but it gets...kind of wacky) but they are 100% new builds every time one gets made. On the other hand, Modern sions are not 100% new, they are kind of doppelgangers - specific humans/shifters from reality are identified, their essence copied, changed up a bit, and then the copies are stuffed into a new construct body and let loose in the city. A good example of this is Sy and Tower, Sy being the original guy (a "Source"), and Tower being the sion that was created.

Aaand finally we have the current new Reality plane. It has been entirely repopulated by humans and shifters. The ancient sions have been largely forgotten except for whatever archaeologists dig up. Since they don't have any way to translate the relics being dug up they are just called "The Lost Race". Modern sions are basically a crypid at this point that everyone calls some variation of "mirror demon" and there is no connection that these two are actually related.

The overall technology level is similar to Earth. Maybe slightly ahead, but it is mostly based in the physical sciences with some augmentation with whatever magic relics they've figured out how to work.

Ahveph can technically manipulate things at Five since it's at the same location, but it generally does not. It has however, made a very convenient shortcut for explorers to travel back and forth between Reality and Memory.

Character locations on this plane:

Five - Sy's family had moved here from overseas when he was young. He grew up here but moved somewhere between Calanom and Five. His mom, dad, and older brother still live here though.

Calanom - Yeah so the kids (Cody, Mady, and Static/Shaun) all live here. Jack (Cavi's Source) was from here as well.

Mercury Falls - Subore and Riley (Torch's Source) are from here, though Subore didn't want to stay after Riley passed away.

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