The Nations of Radix: Hydranatos

Conceptually, the nations of Radix were an idea before I had even come up with the world itself.  Declaria and Aracanoc were both settings I had used in different stories, but they didn't go by that name and they weren't quite as fully developed.  Hydranatos is, and I admit this painfully but with pride, loosely based on the kingdom of Hyrule, from the Legend of Zelda.  It started that way, anyway; it quickly turned into something VASTLY different.

 When I first "built" the country, it appeared strangely unbalanced: there was a sprawling city on one side, with the Root of Water coming up through the middle.  The middle of the landmass rose up in a huge mountain, with wildlands on either side.  On the far said from the city was a massive fortress, deep within soggy marshland and flanked with giant tower.  It was *perfect* for adventuring.

I hated it.

I could never put my finger on it, but something about the landmass just seemed wrong.  I kept tweaking it, messing with parts of the design, but I could never figure out until I sat back and just looked at the (overly simplistic) map I had made.  It dawned on me: it looked like a giant, dead kidney pea, with one end fat and dark and the other thin and moldy.  So I scrapped it and started over.

I flattened the map a little, making it look more like an oval than a bean.  I brought the Root straight up through the middle of the mountain, instead of at the edge.  I built the city into the side of the mountain; the main temple, which originally surrounded the root, was now two buildings, one under the moutain and one built into side and connected by a man-made cave.  The temple still had the same function: to pull water from the Root for use by the residents of the town and the other nations.

I scrapped the fortress idea, in the end substituting it with a man-made fjord at the end of a wide river.  The tower still stands nearby, the residents forbidden from living within a certain distance of the Temple.  The far side of the wide mountain (it's more of a mountain range, but really only has one long line of a "peak") is spotted with towns and villages all up and down its slopes and plateaus; where the actual city of Hydranatos barely ascends to halfway up its side of the mountain, these much smaller settlements rise almost up to the peak.  Surrounding the mountain side and cities is bare rock and soil, outside of the areas that have been cultivated for farming; however, inside mountain is a network of vast caverns, underground rivers and stone aqueducts, some naturally occurring and some made by the strange inhabits that dwell within and without.  Beside the single river that flows to the distant tower near the edge of the continent, there is very little water that is not used up long before it leaves the side of the mountain.

It took a lot of work to be happy with the design, and even more went in to making sure the nation could hold the homes for the various races and stories I had planned for the area (most of which developed between the original design and the eventual rework).  In fact, it may not have finished its evolution even now; as I'm writing this, I'm getting more and more ideas of what I'd want to do with it.  Most of that will probably have to wait until I decide to get back into creatures and races.

Image from Jatin R Patel's blog and iPhone background gallery. No credits listed for original image.