Welcome Home
Arrunal is home. Maybe not your home, but it could be.
The world, the nations, the cities, the neighborhoods, they should all feel real. When a character is doing something, I want it to feel real, like you are reading a biography or documentary of them. When you see them arrive home, it should feel both comfortable and physical in your mind, nostalgic even, while also strange and surreal.
So take a long draw of your drink of choice, nestle in, and walk in the lives of the people of Arrunal.
The World
The world is designed as an alternative landscape that could almost feel like our own world in many ways. It is the canvas in which I can explore different concepts of alternative governments, cultural differences, and the development of nations from completely different origins. But I still want it to feel real and lived in. I want each nation to not just be a thought-experiment, but fleshed out with why it's working and how that looks for the people there. What does modern life look with magic? How would Philosopher Kings function in the atomic age? Can a caste system be egalitarian? I want to explore all of these and more.The People
While humans make up the bulk of the nation-building races, I explore numerous types of sentient beings. Early development in this world had a copy-paste of all the classic fantasy peoples, and while some remain, I wanted to reinvent them in the lens of making it feel real. All of this spawning from the same contemplation of how and why. Beyond sapient races, I want to explore cultures that operate differently. I feed into concepts I want to explore and spiral outward, looking at how a stateless group can grow while remaining connected, what happens in a martial culture taken to the modern age, or a philosophy of nature communion brought into a sensible but extreme conclusion.The Stories
I love writing, though I don't consider myself to be particularly good at it. One of my design philosophies is to make a story with each article. Some small narration that makes it feel like people live there or do that, whatever the topic is. While a full and true novel is my eventual dream, like so many others, I thrive in my little stories. Slice-of-Life makes most worlds feel much more visceral to me, and so I incorporate it as much as I can with small snapshots. I want people to feel alive and places like something you could visit.Visual Arts & AI
I am a writer first and foremost, and one that barely has enough time to write. I am also human. I know the controversy around AI, and agree and understand a lot of the arguments, but I'm also willing to use it as tool. I use it as an alpha-reader for my text and lean on other grammar checking software to clean up my mistakes. I avoid relying on it for any idea creations. For visual arts, I use AI to create the images for things that I cannot find a proper representation of, but I still start with my own hand drawn sketches that are fed into the machine, and make manual edits to get my end result. I will strive to be transparent with the source of all of my art as I make it.Stories and Fictions
I love writing, but I'm sporadic and distracted. Who isn't? That is a major reason why I update so little. I carve out a few minutes each day, but I tend to rewrite and tweak my "completed" texts a dozen times before I ever hit "published". I have hundreds of articles sitting pending as my mind drifts from one topic to another, with few in a polished and finished state. In these articles, I desire to put the narrative forefront. In a list of statistics and functions of a government or event will be snapshots of people who interact with the topic or are immersed in it. I want it to feel alive.
Cover image:
by
Justin L (with AI assitance)
Comments