Origins of Radix

Radix is probably the hardest of my worlds to write about.  It's the most recent, and probably the freshest in my mind.  It's probably the most in-depth, with a ton of detail, an enormous amount of story and a ridiculous amount of notes I've taken over time.  It's got a lot of style (I think), a wonderful cast of strange and fantastic creatures and characters, and elements to it that are so strange, I find myself trying to keep up with everything.

You'd think this would make it easy to write about.  But sometimes, having so much of it going through you all the time, it almost becomes too real to express simply in words.

I mean, seriously, have you ever tried to explain what "Earth" is?  Consider the difficulty of trying to explain the planet to someone that doesn't know what it is.  Or maybe the ocean to someone who hasn't seen water.  It's not impossible, but seriously, where do you start?

I started working on Radix when first started considering a single concept: a world where the inhabitants can, and knowingly, ascend to godhood, but only by fulfilling the role of the god, and only by destroying the one who came before them.  It started with the Thrones, which I eventually decided would have an inscription of what sort of deed was necessary to take the throne.  The roles themselves began to take shape, and eventually I started to separate them into the normal aspects of good and evil.  Deciding that, as the roles changed and instead became Concepts, I took away the black-and-white good-vs.-evil idealisms and instead approached it from a more progressive view, creating opposing forces that wouldn't necessarily fall into such categories.

Still, I felt that I needed some sort of categorization; it was then that I came up with the concept of the Roots.  Giant, solid skyscrapers made of elemental forces: Earth, Fire, Air, Water, Creation (a mix of life and chaos) and Entropy (a mix of death and law).  Each throne is support by one to three roots.  Those supported by individual roots had the more neutral, broader concepts, such as Passion or Faith.  These often didn't have what would be considered a direct opposition in another throne, and the inscriptions were terribly cryptic and next to impossible to fulfill.  Those supported by three roots defined much narrower concepts, such as Domination or Enlightenment.  Normally, these thrones had inscriptions that were much easier for an usurper to fulfill, and often there was an opposing/related throne that those occupying the seats found themselves at odds with each other.

Suddenly, the Roots started to change from an idea to support a new idea for Deities into the basis of the planet itself.  I started considering how the origin of people and other races would start in a world with massive towering structures of elemental force and power.  These structures would have helped create and shape the land masses around them, the powers and idealisms of those that lived there, even the presence of the needed elements could be affected.

Suddenly, I found that I created a functioning world without oceans or seas.  Yeah, I know, that's a HUGE jump.  But that's how it happened, and how I began to really experience Radix.  I couldn't stop thinking about it any more.  Little by little, everything just kept coming into place, until the entire world began *living* in my head, regardless of what I do with it.

I'll have more on Radix, probably more than anything else.  But for now, I figured I should share my insanity, before I went into the details.  And this is probably it for the night, too.  Good night, interwebs.