Where to Begin?

So, I've undertaken to create a world.  After I say "Fiat Lux" and take the rest of the day off, what do I do next?

Twenty years or so ago, I'd sit down with a piece of hex paper and sketch in a big, vaguely Australia-shaped continent with a few islands off to the sides, and start filling in terrain any old way that struck my fancy.  Deserts next to forests near the coast?  No problem.

But now I'd like to take a little more care.  I want to create a fantastic, yet internally consistent environment.  This task is made a little more difficult since I'm thinking in terms of a Dungeons & Dragons game.  I have to have room for wizards, elves, magic items, and monsters.  Dragons would be nice, too.  Otherwise, it's just "Dungeons &" and nobody wants that.

I have some touch points I need to hit for this to be a good world.

• It has to be a place to have adventures.  Further, I don't want to design a world with one overriding conflict.  I could do that pretty easily.  It's even my usual mode of setting design these days.  I just want to try something else.
• It has to be a recognizable setting - but not just plain vanilla.  Worlds that are basically earth with different continents need not apply.  I want something different.  Something fantastic.
• It has to be viable.  But that's fairly easy with magic mucking around with things.  I just need to be sure not to overdo the magic.

So before I get too married to any one concept, I'm going to brainstorm stuff I think would be cool.  Not all of it might make the cut, but I'll give everything a good look.

Brainstorming

• Sky pirates!  Flying ships in general are cool.  Possibly even something more like real aircraft, rather than boats with wings.
• Magic as technology.  It's been done, of course, but in the D&D mode, it makes a lot of sense.  If one out of 1000 people, even, can cure the sick, create light, or throw blasts of fire, that's going to change things.  Even with just one out of 10,000 that's an important issue.  But let's keep the magic "magical" as much as possible.  It won't take on the forms of technology, just fill the functions.  I'll go for all new forms if I can get them.
• Ancient ruins.  Ruins in various types are a staple of the genre.  But let's see if I can come up with a really cool reason for them.
• More nuanced religion.  I have it in my mind that people worship different kinds of things.  Druids might be mystics who are in tune with some kind of nature spirit.  Clerics could be chosen by real, existing gods who are physically present in the setting - or maybe it's not necessary to have "faith" at all.  Anyone who follows the necessary rituals can attune himself to a source of cosmic power.  I'll have to think about it, but one way or the other, religion needs to be a big part of the setting.
• Mecha.  Everything goes better with Mecha.  Or is that tobasco sauce?
• I'd like to do something really new with the demihuman races.  I'm not quite sure what yet.

Cruel and Unusual Geography

One of the big things I'd like to see in this setting is a new foundation.  I really like Creation from Exalted.  D&D's Hollow World was cool, too.  The little pocket realms from Ravenloft are neat, as are the "floating" realms in the Faerie world in Deleria.  There are some other neat options, looking a little further afield.  Discworld (by Terry Prattchet) is a flat disc held aloft by four elephants on the back of a giant turtle.  There was a nifty video game called Septera Core (I think) with a world made of nested spheres that align once in a while.  And in the late, lamented comic book "Meridian" (alas, Crossgen, we hardly knew ye), the world was made up of islands that floated in the air over a poisoned world.

Yeah.  I like that.

There are some issues, of course.  What kept the islands up?  Where did they islanders get food and water?  Way up in the air, there are probably problems with solar radiation and thin air, for that matter.  So I'm going to have to come up with some answers.

In the comic, the rocks floated because they were largely made of a buoyant ore.  Ships flew because trees that fed their roots from tainted ground absorbed whatever chemical made the rocks float.  Of course then one wonders how the ships ever got down to the surface, and why they'd be ship-shaped.  It's not really a very good idea.  There's no reason to build a flying craft that's only water-tight on the bottom, or to limit yourself to sails only on the top.

That's all in the fine details, though.  For now we're working in broad strokes.

The world used to be pretty normal - a spheroid floating in space around a sun (or maybe with a sun and moon orbiting around it.  Why not?).  Then there was a major cataclysm, which is pretty common in Fantasy literature.  The cataclysm ushered in the modern world with floating cities and all.  I'll have to decide when that happened.  The world will be a lot different if it happened "yesterday" than "untold generations ago."  I'll probably shoot for somewhere in the middle.  Shadows of the world that was can still be found in the world that is.

I'll have to decide how many islands there are, how big they are, and how close together.  For now, let's assume they're far enough apart that it takes several days to sail from one to another, although they could be arranged in "archipelagos" to some extent.  They were primarily mountainous regions that were torn from the earth and floated in the sky.

Rather than a "natural" phenomenon, my sky islands will be artifacts.  Each one has a Heartstone that makes it fly and provides other needed functions.  Without the heartstone, the island sinks back to the earth - probably fairly rapidly and uncomfortably for anyone standing on it.  Larger landmasses take bigger, or more, heartstones.

Sky Islands might move slowly, drawn on currents, or pushed by magic.  Maybe just a few of them can and the rest are still mostly stationary.

Since Heartstones are a major resource, everybody has to protect them.  Evil islands could raid their neighbors and steal their heartstones.

Down below, what would we have?  Whatever it is, it drove a lot of people up to the sky.  I'm envisioning a blasted, cracked world, and the fissures lead down into hell (perhaps literally).  There's still life of a sort, perhaps even verdant life in places, but poison seeps up from the depths to taint and kill it.

And there need to be ruins: cities choked with alien plant life, fallen islands, older structures that nobody understands.  Brave explorers can try to delve into the secrets of the past and try to bring up ancient treasures.

Places to Go, People to See

With a rough idea of what the ground (and lack of ground) under everyone's feet will be like, I'm ready to move on to who the people are and where they go.

First of all, there are at least two, possibly three obvious groupings

• Islanders
• Surface-dwellers
• Subterranean cultures

Dungeons & Dragons also provides some groups to consider

• Humans
• Elves
• Dwarves
• Halflings
• Gnomes
• Half-orks, which means I have orks.
• And possibly others.  Half-elves fit in somewhere, and there's various monster races like centaurs.

I'd like to avoid monocultures for any of these groups.  At the very least, there will be different cultures represented on the islands, the surface, and the "underdark," rather than just "Islanders," "Surface people," and "Dwellers below."  I haven't decided how to implement the demihumans yet.  Depending on how wide-spread they are, they could have fewer cultures than the humans (who are presumably natives) do.

At this stage of my planning, all I have are some ideas.

• Islands are mostly individual city-states.
• A powerful empire or trade federation that controls multiple Islands and possibly is also significant on the surface.
• I'd like to see Dwarves as a major power.
• There should be cults.  Every setting needs cults.  This one can have crazy druid cults dedicated to corruption and pollution.

There will, no doubt, be more later.  But now I have some bare bones to start with.  Next, I need to start working out some specific issues that will shape the rest of the world development.  But that's a post for another day.