Home

This website is a compendium of worldbuilding to the tune of biologic speculation, geologic inference, and cultural makeup stemming from both those things. It is forever a work in progress, a way for me to familiarize myself with HTML and have everything in one place. I like fantasy that just puts you in a world and lets you figure it out as you go. So that's what I get up to.

Throughout, you will encounter a few superscripts¹- hover over them to see additional details, usually out-of-universe stuff, but also just asides, because if I didn't use superscripts, my sentences would have 18 commas each. They already do sometimes.

Overview

The laws of physics remain the same. There is no magic system. Any gods exist in theology and myth only- their effect on the world is only as impactful as the belief of those below. The fantasy comes from the shape the world takes, not a changing of rules.

The world's name is Synsolic: a word older than any surviving language, roughly translating to 'together beneath the sun.' And for much of history², that's what existed- the surface, and the people inhabiting it. There is more than that, but that's a story for another day.

Synsolic consists of a single, large landmass spanning from approximately 45˚S to 75˚N, spanning of parts of 3 major tectonic plates (and a fourth micro-plate). The planet orbits their sun at a comparable distance and angle as we do: a year is the same length of time as ours; their seasons are similar. There are two moons of similar composition to each other and of comparable size, resulting from a breakup of a larger, single moon billions of years ago. They orbit independant of each other and thus lunar eclipses- in which the nearest moon obscures the furthest- are semi-regular.

History can be split most simply into two time periods, pre and post cataclysm, referring to the eruption of the magma chamber that had sat silently for centuries at the northern edge of the continent. The volcanic arc that makes up the mountain range of the north are known as the Spectators, however, the magma chamber that caused the cataclysm was not of the volcanic arc, but a rear-arc volcano fed by a much larger and older chamber. The resulting massive caldera, just south of the range, is often referred to as The Shell. This cataclysm decimated the landscape and the people living there alike, destroying the structure of the world, taking hundreds of thousands of lives. Much of my focus and thus the focus of this site is on the time period approximately 150 years after the eruption. Ash has cooled and both land and lives have settled, but both are empty and scattered still as a result of what preceeded them.

This world is inhabited by a cast of humanoid species. Each species has its own culture, mythos, values, and intracacies, but all humanoids live intwined with one another across landscapes. There are no longer cities or empires consisting of one single, primary species: those all fell with the cataclysm. All that remains are small, scattered settlements, inhabited by whoever happens to make their home there. There are trends, especially following tradition or historical geographic setting, but there is always a great deal of intermingling. Any species-specific norms are a general rule, broadly followed by members of that species, but as with any rule they can be broken by individuals.

Non-humanoid biology is similar to ours, save for the additional hexapoda clade which emerged simultaneously as tetrapods, during a time when the landmasses were seperate from each other. Hexapods are, in extant times, rarer than tetrapods, but still present, mostly as reptiles and amphibians. Most notable are dragons and griffons, which carry notoriety amidst humanoids for their size and potential threat, and have occupied varying degrees of superstition and ritual in many cultures since time immemorial.