Welcome to Yvoria, a world of dragons, moons, and magical gems.

[jfslayne]

I have been working on creating my fantasy universe for 6 years. It’s quite broad and deep, so I won’t try to get into everything here.

Yvoria is the name of the planet in my original fantasy universe. From the center of the planet grows the world tree. The branches of the world tree reach out into space and anchor the seven moons to the planet. Those moons and their themes are:
Pyraythis-magma
Oceanis-endless sea
Saikora-deserts
Ithiryx-duality/light & shadow
Ferridun-divine forges
Harmyrian-crystals/harmonics
Virdion-Abundant life
In an event, that I won’t get into here, the world tree becomes poisoned. This leads to the branch holding Pyraythis to weaken and break. The moon falls to the planet causing an apocalypse. The world recovers, rebuilds, and advances over 10,000 years. Then the next moon falls. The moons continue to fall cyclically every 10,000 years. Each moon fall kicks off a new “Age” and ends the previous one. (e.g. the fall of Pyraythis starts the age of brimstone)

Each age has its own unique metaphysical characteristics. The best example of this is the “Age of Division” after the fall of Ithiryx. Ithiryx was held by twin branches in the shape of a double helix. The moon splits in half, the twin branches spiral away from each other. The physical effect of this fall isn’t as catastrophic as the others because the twin branches and their spiral redirect the moon halves to fall at an angle instead of straight down. The metaphysical effect is very severe. The halves of Ithiryx (Ithir & Yx) create extreme division among the people of the world. Most of the population congregates around one half or the other. Those around Ithir follow an extreme dogma of discipline and are very legalistic, with this comes a complete intolerance for “impurity.” Those around Yx believe in absolute freedom, with this comes an overall indulgence in hedonistic activities. Each side utterly hates the other. They fight brutal wars, and each side enslaves those who they capture from the other side. Each moon fall has its own consequences, but as of now the fall of Ithiryx is my favorite that I’ve made.

I think I’ll stop there for now so as not to make this post too long. There are two more pillars of my universe that I can go over in a separate post. One is that instead of a pantheon of gods my universe was created by a pantheon of dragons. There were 10 original dragons of primary elements (air, water, fire, stone, etc) who had children in pairs of twins that embody abstractions of their parents’ elements (e.g. the air and water dragons have the dragon of rain and the dragon of mist) The other is the magic system I’ve developed, the two main avenues of magic in my world are using gems that channel different elements, (ruby=fire, Topaz=electricity [yes this was inspired by tears of the kingdom]) and “bloodline blessings” which is where a dragon blesses a mortal with their power and that power is passed on to their descendants. When two people of different bloodline blessings have a child that child will manifest a totally unique power not associated with a dragon. After tens of thousands of years this leads to a world like My Hero Academia where the majority of people are born with unique powers.

I have found that having people ask questions about my stories easily leads me to new developments, so please, ask as many questions as you’d like!

 

[RoccO]

Dogma is an interesting premise to begin a fantasy with, it is usually in the world of sci-fi though, not exclusive to it. I have seen the two hemisphere problem before in some books and my ideas, they weren’t very interesting books but it relied on violence, and a superhero with brutal strength. (I would be interested here to include I did not stick around for the ending.) The books were centred around the criminal corporation, because where else would it go, and involved alien technology that I will not go into here, but suffice to say it involved tattoos.

To include a separate system to the original moon structure would be hard because it implies man has an effect on god, god/man or man. The pantheon of scifi would differ from fantasy, but they are such simple and reoccurring themes, it drowns out the plot of a story thins it to an exact point, then peters out. You could say the dragons are malevolent beings with their own agenda, that would make sense if you included it in the story, but mythology and legend sorely differ with themes. They differ on two fronts - one, god is perfect - two, god is eternal. I do not think a pantheon has ever made any helpful sense in a work of fiction, the bones of society are too begrudging, unless there is a fair and easy way to let dragons succeed.

Gems are interesting, because it implies power resides somewhere. You could have statues, with gems resonating with magic, keeping certain talents to a different area, then it could involve skill to create the relics, and nothing more than wit to use it. It could have healing or destructive elements, (and I say elements here as regards to power or material,) and it could be the political structure of the world, a more scholarly note, for the nosey sorcerer. The wizards job would be the most interesting. Instead of being a mediator between good and evil, or the wielder of magical artefacts, they would be an emissary of the law, fighting here and there with no authority to challenge him/her.

 

[TheCrystallineEntity]

This world is like catnip to me. You've certainly put a lot of thought into it, and I applaud your efforts.
Love the dragon pantheon, so I'd like to know more about them.
If you don't mind a mild critique, unless your races live exceedingly long lives, or are immortal, I'd suggest shortening each age from 10,000 years to a couple hundred, or at most a thousand. I get the temptation of wanting ridiculously long time-spans, but 10,000 years ago, people were hunting mammoths and still working out what fire can be used for. If your races do live a long time, then my next piece of advice is to really dig deep into the social, political, and cultural implications of how that affects people, which you may have done already.

 

[jfslayne]

Dogma is an interesting premise to begin a fantasy with, it is usually in the world of sci-fi though, not exclusive to it. I have seen the two hemisphere problem before in some books and my ideas, they weren’t very interesting books but it relied on violence, and a superhero with brutal strength. (I would be interested here to include I did not stick around for the ending.) The books were centred around the criminal corporation, because where else would it go, and involved alien technology that I will not go into here, but suffice to say it involved tattoos.

To include a separate system to the original moon structure would be hard because it implies man has an effect on god, god/man or man. The pantheon of scifi would differ from fantasy, but they are such simple and reoccurring themes, it drowns out the plot of a story thins it to an exact point, then peters out. You could say the dragons are malevolent beings with their own agenda, that would make sense if you included it in the story, but mythology and legend sorely differ with themes. They differ on two fronts - one, god is perfect - two, god is eternal. I do not think a pantheon has ever made any helpful sense in a work of fiction, the bones of society are too begrudging, unless there is a fair and easy way to let dragons succeed.

Gems are interesting, because it implies power resides somewhere. You could have statues, with gems resonating with magic, keeping certain talents to a different area, then it could involve skill to create the relics, and nothing more than wit to use it. It could have healing or destructive elements, (and I say elements here as regards to power or material,) and it could be the political structure of the world, a more scholarly note, for the nosey sorcerer. The wizards job would be the most interesting. Instead of being a mediator between good and evil, or the wielder of magical artefacts, they would be an emissary of the law, fighting here and there with no authority to challenge him/her.

Thank you for this feedback. I’m going to have to read it a few times to fully digest it, but here’s my response after the first pass.

1. The story doesn’t begin with this dogmatic age. The age of division is the tenth out of the fourteen ages I’ve made. I just felt that it was the best example of how the moons have an effect on the world at large.

2. I’m handling the dragons differently than mortals or gods. First off, there are the ancient dragons and then the regular dragons. The ancient dragons are the 10 primordial dragons created by the masculine and feminine creator beings, and then their offspring that they had with each other, each being an embodiment, herald, or keeper of an element. Each ancient dragon can reproduce asexually creating the regular dragons. The ancient dragons really do exist but to most they are myths. The regular dragons are quite common depending on the time period. The ancient dragons aren’t perfect, but they’re whole. By whole I mean the dragons, for the most part, don’t have developmental arcs. Water is water as it always has been and always will be. Water did not need to learn how to be water. So the dragon of water hatches fully knowing its place in the world. Because of this they have mature philosophies as to what existence means to them. (Of course these philosophies are limited to what I’m able to come up with, so I can’t say that they’re perfect philosophies) The dragons also can die. In my world every dragon has a physical body and a spiritual one. When the dragon’s physical body is alive half of their spirit exists within their body, the other half exists in “the hidden valley of dragons,” which is a pocket universe with hidden doorways out in the real world. When a dragon physically dies it’s spirit in the hidden valley becomes whole, though there are ways that a dragon, including the ancient dragons, can be killed in body and spirit.

3. You’ve given me a lot to think about regarding gem magic. Here is the origin of why gems are magical. “The Elder Dragon” (the first creator in the universe who is divinely masculine) was only able to create stone like matter, with which he laid the foundations of the world. After he had laid these foundations his feminine counterpart, “the purple mist,” appeared in the universe. The purple mist’s creative power was not in generating new things but in refining what already existed. Her first act of creation was turning some of the Elder Dragon’s stone into the first crystal, by carefully rearranging its atoms. The Elder Dragon was so impressed by the crystal that he intentionally blessed all crystals to come to have the ability to harness and channel his essence, which exists everywhere. (His essence is like a magical version of the cosmic microwave background)

3. I really like the ideas you presented of how I can handle gems in my universe. Gems being connected to magic was one of my first concepts so I’ve kind of just noted it as a fact of my universe and haven’t put a lot of thought into the logistics of it. One idea I have though is in regard to how gems are supplied. Long story short, a man who practiced both alchemy and necromancy invented a clay that could be formed around the bones of the dead to create automaton like beings who he tasked with mining gems. He became unfathomably wealthy and his family carried on the trade. (I don’t know for how long exactly, but a long time) Side note, raw gems channel crude power, so a topaz gem would create indiscriminate lightning bolts. But gems can be given specific tasks through cutting the gem in a specific way, and/or carving a rune into it. For example a topaz gem with a delicate cut and rune could be manipulated into creating small but focused electrical charges meant to cause involuntary muscle movements.

 

[jfslayne]

This world is like catnip to me. You've certainly put a lot of thought into it, and I applaud your efforts.
Love the dragon pantheon, so I'd like to know more about them.
If you don't mind a mild critique, unless your races live exceedingly long lives, or are immortal, I'd suggest shortening each age from 10,000 years to a couple hundred, or at most a thousand. I get the temptation of wanting ridiculously long time-spans, but 10,000 years ago, people were hunting mammoths and still working out what fire can be used for. If your races do live a long time, then my next piece of advice is to really dig deep into the social, political, and cultural implications of how that affects people, which you may have done already.

I will admit that I chose 10,000 tests arbitrarily because it is a clean number. That being said, I do have a reason behind why I want the timeline to be so long.

I love conspiracy theories, though I don’t believe in most of them. One of my favorite theories of all time is that of a “great reset.” 10,000 years ago humans were hunting mammoths and learning how to use fire, but what of that was the result of a catastrophe? What if 11,000 years ago humans lived in a utopia where no one had to work because everything was done by automatons? Then a world wide disaster happens where their source of power was eradicated, the automatons became defunct, and the human race had to start over from scratch because no one thought of learning the skills that the automatons had taken over? I don’t believe that anything like that actually happened, but the thought of it excites me to the point that I want to explore great resets in my own writing.

Also I do have some long lived races (like elves. I know.. shocker)

 

[RoccO]

I have some idea about gems, harnessing a sort of element, for the wizards. It works that gems in a way are solid and mined, but there is a base level of magic to any crystal, taking the form of stalactites or stalagmites. The gems are then imbued with power, not exactly possessing it initially, as a sort of mother curse belies them into cursing their form and corrupting them into something useful.

The mining itself is different which is typical. It involves caves, not holes in the ground, blown up by dynamite. These holes in the ground may exist, but only from rock bed. Then the mining takes place with rather primitive picks and axes, involved with burning down trees, using the land for resources and fuel forges.

I don’t know how long the magic lasts, but there is a lot of transference. The gems are most useful for hovering above ground like the unobtainium, and they are sort of useful for keeping moods, but they are a widespread arc, not accurate in their doling.

 

[pmmg]

Well, I am asking....

How can a Moon fall into its planet, and the planet recover? That would take about 100,000,000 years, not 10K. During which, life would not be possible. The world would just be a ball of fire until it cooled off again.

I suppose I am not supposed to be thinking about that, but...It wont slip by without me asking.

Maybe moon is not the right word.

 

[EchE8]

I really like the concept you've got working here. These types of epic, cosmic SFF settings are hard to pull off, but it seems that you've got a fine start.
In particular, something that draws me in is the moons and their falling, and the upheaval that comes after them. Epic stories like this that span over tens of thousands of years are made or broken by the events in their history, specifically the minute details.
One good example I can think of is JRR Tolkien's Middle-earth. What makes Tolkien's universe so appealing is the level of detail put into the history. Reading his legendarium (which I haven't for a couple of years, so I'm rusty on it) feels like a real, authentic world cause there's just so much happening in the world's history.
In your post, you've mostly detailed the broader, bigger lore of your world. I'd be interested in hearing deeper details, specifically about the history of the setting; what has happened over the tens of thousands of years since the tree's poisoning. It'd be awesome to hear more about both the Age of Division and the other, likely cataclysmic, ages of your world.
I'd reccomend writing out some sort of timeline. I find that to be a very helpful tool for worldbuilding history. And if you already have one of those, you ought to share it! I'd certainly be interested in looking at it.