Introduction

About eight years ago, I began writing Edos. Back then it was a very different world than it is now, and it’s changed drastically a couple of times, but just like a genetic bottleneck, it’s served only to improve it. Survival of the fittest.

Originally, Edos was just a homebrew world I made for a D&D 3.5 campaign I was DMing, but very quickly it became much more than that. First thing to go were the elves and dwarves and orcs, for instance.

Back then, Edos was less a world and more a map I had drawn in MS Paint. I made little notations, giving places names, and started scribbling in my notebooks little aspects of culture and language when I should have been studying.

That’s when I realized that I wanted to be a writer, that being a writer was my true calling, that that’s what I wanted (and still do) to do with my life. That’s when I started taking Edos seriously.

It was an unexplored world, and I had only my vague map to guide me, but as I explored it by building it, I came to discover just how amazing it was. It wasn’t so much as if I was making it up, as uncovering it, like I had stumbled on some long forgotten manuscript detailing a real world and was translating it.

Aspects of everything I loved began appearing in it. I saw influences from Robert E. Howard, Tolkien, Frank Herbert, Star Wars, Star Trek, Dragon Age, history, mythology, and a heaping load of anthropology. Real cultures added their own influences, but I’ve never felt that any one culture was just a metaphor for a real one. The Anos are not the French, the Odruns are not the Mongolians. They share many aspects, yes, but they are still unique.

Over the past eight years I’ve written countless short stories and novellas taking place in Edos. Most have never seen the light of day because when I write for Edos, I’m writing for me. The ones I have shared have always received overwhelming praise, and everyone I’ve let visit Edos in their own way has always wanted more, always wanted to return.

I’ve written several novels worth now of history, culture, and language, forgotten most of it, and rewrote it all several times over. I’ve spent hours drawing maps, diagrams, portraits, blueprints, designs.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif"">What I’m left with now is a living, breathing, real world that’s more rich and vibrant than I could have ever hoped to create. It’s surpassed even my greatest expectations, and the best part is I’ve still only explored a small portion of it.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif"">It’s still a lot of unexplored territory, and there’s some territory I intend never to explore, or if I do, never to say what I’ve found there. I believe the most important thing about worldbuilding, about making a fictional setting seem real, is to keep as much mystery as possible.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif"">That said, after eight years, it’s getting awfully difficult to carry around a world of nearly six hundred million people, of thousands upon thousands of years of history and culture and language in my head. It’s also getting increasingly difficult to keep things straight, considering what’s not only in my head is strewn across everything from napkins to the desks I sat at during classes and finding out any one thing is like finding a slip of paper in a library. While you’re riding a unicycle. On fire. And blindfolded.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif"">I feel like Edos is also finally ready to see the light of day. If it were human it would be in second grade by now, so I think it’s time to let it out. A close friend of mine once told me that with Edos I hadn’t just made a world, I’d made a home, and she felt happier there than anywhere else, so I’d like to think I’m doing some good by sharing everything.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif""> A big part of that, obviously, is going to be publishing short stories and novels taking place in Edos, as that’s really the best way to experience it. Yet for the sake of my own organization as much as anyone else’s enjoyment, I think it also needs to be firmly drawn out, written down, and figured out.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif"">To me Edos is a work of love, of sleepless nights, of bad grades because I was too busy creating fictional languages or drawing sword designs, of private escapism, and the joy of sharing all that with like minded people.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman","serif"">So with all that in mind, welcome to Edos, friend. This should tell you more or less what you need to know to get started and get your bearings. Just be careful. All it took was a vague pixilated map for me to find my way here and get stuck for eight years.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:24px;"> - Forest Frederick, October 2013 (Ymrae (talk) 19:06, October 20, 2013 (UTC))

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