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I wasn't initially going to post this because I've been feeling self-conscious about doing indulgent, sort of aimless Fantasy World Building.

I feel especially self-conscious as I get older and recognize that I keep falling in the same creative ruts, how my draftsmanship hasn't improved, how I keep circling the same ideas but never really doing anything with them...

Often it feels frivolous and kind of childish to keep falling back into 'let me describe twenty kinds of guy I made up" type comfort zone art, and I wish my aims were more mature than that, but at the same time coaxing my brain into a position where I can do even that has been a challenge lately.

Anyway it was from one of these pits of frustration that I decided I need to get over myself and just make something regardless of how artistically limp it is. So I decided to force myself to have a little project. In this case I decided to look into tabletop map-making games because there's a few I've enjoyed.

So these are the results from playing a solo world-building RPG called Foundations. It's a neat game. I didn't entirely vibe with all the prompts and the directions they pointed. The game feels like it was designed from a desire to have have a more systemic and anthropological way of thinking about a fantasy world, but also to make sure Orcs show up somehow- which doesn't seem like a dissonance that can fully be resolved? I still had fun with it.

I'm not sharing the huge, chaotic map I made crudely scribbling with oil crayons and pencil because it's almost incomprehensible- unless somebody really wants to see it. I hope to redraw it some time!

Description of the creatures depicted is below:

From left-to-right, top-to-bottom

1. The first people. They are semi-aquatic beaver-like creatures who live along the coasts of a northerly continent. There are practically no trees in their homeland but they learned to build dwellings from driftwood and clever weaving of reeds. They still mostly dwell in their original homeland but their cultures have gone through a lot of changes over the course of history.

2. The outsiders. These are a very ancient species who arrived through a dimensional rift before any other civilization had developed. They went extinct trying to tap some kind of primal, telluric energy and permanently scarred the western continent in the process. To this day the whole region where they originated is unstable and irradiated with a kind of wild magic that tends to transform things like cosmic putty, although the effect has lessened a lot with time. They appear in a semi-mythic way in the oral histories of the earliest people.

3. The constructs. Ageless golems created as servants for the outsiders. Some of them survived the extinction of the outsiders because they were working underground in tunnels and facilities that were sheltered from the effect. They still try and follow their original instructions although with passing millennia they've gradually become confused and their understanding of their instructions has taken on a kind of religious, ritual quality. Many of them are busy endlessly constructing and deconstructing a vast and empty city in the homeland of their vanished creators. How they sense the world, communicate, and what powers them is unclear.

4. The water people. They're the first decedents or our original mammalian species, who adapted to an entirely oceanic lifestyle. They are eventually driven from their home seas by an underwater volcanic eruption that turns their seas acidic, and most of them now live scattered around the world, often in the harbors of various other civilizations.

5. The pointwoods people. Decedents of the first people who migrated across the seas to the south where there are lush coniferous forests in the rain shadow of huge mountain ranges. They domesticated these tusked predator animals to aid them in hunting and they build beautiful cities out of timber but tend to live in pretty small clan groups.

6. The grey people. Descendants of pointwoods people who migrated north and east of the same continent. They developed agriculture and their civilization spread out along that coast.

7. The bird-herders. These people also descended from a migration of pointwoods people who kept going along the coast and became a semi-nomadic steppe people living in the dry regions of the south. They tend herds of giant birds which they also mastered riding. Eventually they split into multiple cultures, while some still follow the nomadic traditions others have formed city states.

8. The stone people. Descended from people who migrated across the seas to the arid tundras of a western continent. They're named for the stone ring-cities they build. They domesticated huge ox-like creatures (not-pictured). Eventually they spread across the seas and formed a kind of inner sea trade network.

9. The wildfolk. These people emerged from the ruins of the outsiders' civilization, possibly as existing animals that were transformed by the release of energy from that disaster. They change body shapes numerous times in their youth before finally settling on a form, and members of this species tend to look very different from each other. They've mastered a kind of shape magic that lets them transform matter like it was clay.

10. Deep dwellers. They are descended from wild folk who moved into the harsh mountain ranges of the south. Something about their migration away from the rift-scarred homeland of the outsiders caused them to settle into a certain small, very fluffy form. They live in complex subterranean burrows.

Some follow-up notes:

• Foundations insists on not conflating cultures and species, which I absolutely agree with, but doesn't give a lot of tools for tracking the emergence of species and cultures independently so it's very hard not to fall into it especially when you only ever get a few prompts for a culture.

• In this case I'm just talking about the species that emerged in this setting. A lot of them are pretty closely matched to a culture group since they haven't moved a lot or had as much time to develop.

• I didn't note the specific civilizations, cultures, empires, etc. here but it'd be interesting to describe some with a demographic breakdown maybe and try depicting how they might look. The grey people, pointwoods people, and bird-herders for example definitely live in the same cities along with the stone people, and descendants of the first people are all over the place.

• Additionally, it wasn't really my intent to make every creature kind of a funny animal that just sort of happened procedurally because my first species were these beaver guys! I think its interesting that as a result of their rapid speciation most of the creatures here are kind of close cousins who could probably have offspring, which means ethnicity as it relates to species is probably pretty complicated for them and would have more to do with their native culture.

• I'm pretty sensitive to the weird implications this kind of approach can have on the conception of a fictional world too, I may write a follow-up most with some of my thoughts on that if I can find the energy

• This isn't for anything except for me thinking about this kind of stuff and how I may approach it in the future.