Azrearda: The Dragon’s Dream

Azrearda World Bible

Platform: N/A
Engine: N/A
Development Time: 4 Months
Team Size: 1
Developer: Self
My Role(s): World builder, Sole developer
Download link provided upon request.

Azrearda: The Dragon’s Dream is a full world building bible for the fictional universe of the same name. It is a fully fleshed-out fantasy setting in which the environment constantly shifts in erratic and unpredictable ways, and the world’s people never speak to avoid waking the dragon they exist in the dream of. The bible consists of major ecological and cultural information, maps, as well as a timeline of major events in the world’s history.
My Contributions to this project include:

Creation of the initial concept of the world.
All treatments and content included in the world bible, including maps and timelines.

Researching various environmental conditions, ecological concepts, and various cultures to make the world feel more real.

A World from Scratch

An image from the Azrearda world bible that introduces the concept of the world itself. The text continues on the next page, pictured below. Click to view the full-size PDF.

This world bible was created over the course of a single semester, without the assistance of any pre-existing material to work with. My work on this Bible was entirely my own doing from the initial concept to the final details.

The page after the previous one pictured. The text continues on the next page, pictured below. Click to view the full-size PDF.

Coming up with the basic concept was in equal parts the most fun and most challenging part of the creation of this project. There were very few constraints in place for what the world could be, so narrowing down the ideas I had was rather difficult. I ended up choosing the idea of a world whose geography constantly shifts in bizarre and unpredictable ways because I thought it would be the best way to explore the subject of world building as a whole. It gave me space to tackle a variety of subjects and ideas in terms of both environment and culture.

The page after the previous one pictured. Click to view the full-size PDF.

After coming up with this concept, I then had to find a reason to justify the strange state of the world. This was where the idea of the world taking place entirely in a dream came from. Not only could this be used to explain the strange flux state of the land, but it also allowed me to add other bizarre concepts to the world that would only make sense within a dream.

The Intersection of World and Man

An image from the Azrearda world bible that introduces the Shifter culture. Click to view the full-size PDF.

One of the most important considerations I made while working on this project was how different cultures in the world of Azrearda would interact with the bizarre conditions present in the world. This was the main thing I tried to keep in mind when writing the descriptions for each of Azrearda’s three main cultural groups. I wrote each group with the active intention of their main difference being how they interface and grapple with the harsh world they inhabit.

The Shifters were the first culture I had in mind when creating Azrearda, being the simplest from a design standpoint, and also the least divorced from the initial concept of the world in the first place. They are the culture that exemplifies the core idea of the world and are representations of those who have the most ambivalent view of the world they live in and have the most straightforward approach to surviving in it. Most cultures in the real world would most likely evolve into this if suddenly transported into Azrearda.

An image from the Azrearda world bible that introduces the Volcanic culture. Click to view the full-size PDF.

The Volcanic Culture was one I created to fit in with the plot for the world itself, fitting in with the plot point of the shifting landscape slowly homogenizing into volcanic wastelands over time. The Volcanic people have a very rigid lifestyle compared to the Shifters and view the world of Azrearda with much more hostility, but also reverence. As the group who have faced the most hardship as a result of the world, it only made sense for them to be the ones that represent a resentment towards the world they’re from.

An image from the Azrearda world bible that introduces the Magician culture. Click to view the full-size image.

Lastly, the Magician culture, which was created around the idea of a group of people that choose to exploit Azrearda, rather than suffer from it. Creating a culture like this allowed me to explore the consequences of a culture of people actively trying to exploit land, as well as others around them. Their exploitation of Azrearda was a purposeful decision in order to mirror their exploitation and mistreatment of the lower class.