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《Odyssey》Author's Diary #1

Hello and welcome to the References chapter! I'll make new Reference chapters every once in a while when the lore and worldbuilding of my story progresses far enough! Basically, these are my notes as to the worldbuilding of my story with a heavy visual focus to help you the reader see the things that I see! All of this is purely just notes ripped straight out of my One note.

And as a major disclaimer: None of these images are mine! All of them have been grabbed from google images!

The basis of my idea for the "Giant Crab" (Walkers are their actual name in Mysterium) comes from a combination of the tripods in War of the Worlds and the Striders in Half Life:

Source for left: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d4/07/77/d40777d082ff642cdff690295806b4e3.jpg

Source for the right: It's just a screenshot from Half-Life Alyx

Walkers, as I've said before, are a combination of the two above images. They aren't mechanical, but are fully organic creatures with four legs. You can kinda see how they look like crabs or giant spiders, just with fewer legs. As a fan of both Half-Life and the War of the Worlds movies, I thought these creatures were so badass walking over the terrain, raining terror on everything down below. Walkers will come up again in the near future in my story (I haven't forgotten about them, we will learn much more about them in the coming chapters!)

Walkers also make the same noises as the two above creatures do, which doesn't really make too much sense now that I think about it, considering that crabs don't make noises at all. My justification for the foghorn-like roars that Walkers make is simply that it is a form of communicating with other nearby Walkers at long distances. Since they are such large creatures (Closer in size to the Tripods from War of the Worlds), communication between Walkers has to be loud and broad for others to receive the message, since they are almost always at long distances. In reality, I just thought the roar was kinda cool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

My main inspiration for the Demi-Humans were originally more of a human looking race with animal-like qualities, as seen all over the place in media. Most importantly, the original inspiration for this story, GATE. In earlier three drafts of my book (All of which were fanfiction, and the first of which was immediately revised and was never published, the second of which wasn't good and I eventually deleted, and the third one I'm still somewhat proud of and can be found under the name Odyssey: The Fall of Fargo), demi-humans looked more like this:

The source for this one is actually the cover of another story on Royal Roads and Webnovel, but the author also doesn't know where the cover art came from (I didn't read it, this is just the cover).

I eventually decided against visualizing demi-humans in this way. 1) It didn't fit the more "serious" aesthetic of the story I wanted to go for. It felt too cartoonish to me, and I realized that I wanted to fully commit to making this as ""realistic"" (major warnings about the word realistic) as possible. 2) It doesn't make too much sense for the worldbuilding of the different races that I'm going for. Humans exist in my world, but how did they get animal traits like ears and tails? Why would they have some features of animals, and yet keep the weaker build that a Human body has? I wanted to make my Demi-Humans have the powers relative to the creatures they belonged to.

As such, I decided to commit fully to making this more like a skryim type world. I shifted away from that and decided instead to envision them (at risk of being labelled a furry) more like the Khajiit, or these guys who are far more animalistic:

Source: Again, no clue. I've tried digging deep to find the original artist, but no luck :(

It just makes more sense for my book to fully commit to the more animalistic versions of demi-humans than to just make humans with animal-like appearances. Lizardmen and Insectoids also look like their reptillian and bug counterparts.

Here is my idea of what the Warrior Elves (Kiote tribe) look like. As I've said before, their culture is heavily inspired by the Northeastern Iroqouis and Algonquin Native American tribes of old, but I've taken a lot more liberties with how they look individually:

Source:https://cdnb.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/032/374/591/large/apu-dutta-x-warrior-female.jpg?1606249362&dl=1

This is what I imagine what the clothing of normal Kiotes would look like. So this is what Otaes would wear during the winter for example.

Source: https://i.pinimg.com/474x/35/db/e3/35dbe33e118f74ef8358b3a6136b6ee2--character-concept-character-art.jpg

And this is what the Kitchi Warriors of the Kiote Nation sort of look like. Though, the helmet in my version looks a lot more like an ox skull, used primarily to give off more of that "creepy" and "fearsome" look.

As to what the elves (Both Warrior Elves and Eastern Elves alike) look like themselves, this is kinda what I had in mind:

Source for the left: https://www.naarielart.co.uk/

Source for the right: https://www.artstation.com/mochimalha

This is Serj's reference image, note the Adrian helmet from WW1 in our timeline, and relatively modern looking clothing.

Source: Battlefield 1 French Assault

Of course, Serj is an elf and not a human. But I just wanted to point out that I've based the uniforms of the Falklands empire off of a mixture of uniforms dating back to WW1 and the late 1800s. For example, this is my idea of Falkish soldiers:

The Falkish also use equipment from around the same era. They have basic industrialization and are capable of producing interchangeable parts for weapons, which has given them a massive advantage of the Iscariot Empire that still uses Early-Modern equipment. Nor do the Iscariots use guns, and instead have perfected the use of offensive magic and dragons to give them a fair fight against the Falkish. I'd still say that even now, the Falkish are weaker than the Iscariot Empire, but they've closed the gap significantly.

Speaking of Iscariots, here is what their army looks like:

This is the boring "realistic" version

THIS is the way cooler, fantasy version.

The first image is more accurate with regards to the type of equipment used, but the second image is more accurate to what the Iscariot army is really about. They use dragons, magic, and brute strength to win battles against the technologically superior Falkish.

And of course, this wouldn't be complete without the Reformists. But since the Reformation is more of a movement rather than a formal group, this is what the Revolutionaries in Minerva would look like: