OK, folks. This is the first of what will be a series of posts on the people and places of Aromathus; the purpose of which is to allow you, dear reader, to get a little more familiar with the world that I like to call home. Some of these will cover nations, some of them history, and some of them people. So, without further ado…

Aromathus: As I said in my first journal entry, when I laid out the world, I wanted to create a world that had a much more “realistic” system of government and politics than anything I had heard of or seen in the many novels or game worlds I had already experienced. Beyond that, I wanted to incorporate many different possibilities and locations for story arcs as well.

This meant several things. First, I will admit that I am, and always have been an Anglophile. (For those of you with some orc blood in you, that means I like English culture and history). So, one of the cultures I represented in the world would be very English – stiff upper lip, chip, chip, cheerio and all that rot, with the people coming from an island and sailing around the world in ships.

Another thing: I’ve always wanted to try was to run an RPG campaign based on sailing ships and oceans; this fact flowed naturally with the interest in English history. Now, I’ll admit that since I created the world, I have since read Ursula LeGuin’s fine “Wizard of Earthsea” novels, but that lay in the future back in 1994 – so while it may seem like it to those of you who have read her books, the Narvith Empire doesn’t come from there at all.

Second, one of the first ideas that I had was that humans weren’t going to be the superior race they are in so much fantasy. Also, they weren’t going to be native to the continent where the stories would be set. Rather, I decided that they were going to be “agents of chaos,” coming from an ancient land, but recently; well, ok, 1500 years ago. In other words, long enough for their culture to have developed, but not so long ago that the other races didn’t dislike them for it. After all, there are elves (not many, but a few) floating around who still remember those days. Elves live a long time in Aromathus; they are not immortal, but a few elves might hit their second millennia before they pass on.

So the humans came to the world, and settled first in a vast archipelago off the continent – think of our world’s Indonesia. Then, after several hundred years, they moved on, sending colonies to the continent of Aromathus itself.

There was one problem with that, though. Other people lived there, and they didn’t like humans all that much. Some of those people were elves and dwarves, but some of them were green. And they really didn’t like humans. After all, who likes people who steal your land?

And so two more cultures were born, and these are the two cultures that are the primary ones featured in A Dance with Dragons: the orcs, and the Empire of Averim.

I will talk more about these cultures in more detail in future posts, but for now, a few of the ideas that gave them shape. First, the Empire of Averim:

Originally, I had planned on Averim being Germanic, a counter-point to the English – based Narvith Empire. I started out giving places there German-sounding names, working some of the old Germanic lore into their culture, etc. But it never seemed quite right. That never bothered me, though, as for several years I played around in the Narvith Empire and in my friend’s portion of the world to the north - Sandore (more on that later, too… I promise!) But when I came up the original plot for ADWD, it needed to be set someplace where there were orcs, and a lot of them. And so my foray into Averim began.

When I was discussing the plot with one of my friends, I told him how the humans were always fighting on their borders, never quite at peace, but never quite at war. They had fought major wars with the elves and the dwarves in the past and lived in peace now, but that simply wasn’t possible with the orcs. In fact, the orcs were always slipping across the river, launching raids and invasions, and this was part of the reason why Averim was a huge empire in a medieval fantasy setting – they needed a strong army to keep the enemies out. Without such a strong central government, Averim would be over run by her enemies, and so a classic feudal government wouldn’t work. Kings would have to have more power than in feudalism.

He then looked at me and made the comment that turned Averim into a working government – and gave birth to the plot. “Ah, it’s like the Roman Empire defending the Danube. Border forts and legions to patrol against the barbarians.” That was it, in a nutshell, except the Ishkar is the Danube. Otherwise, the analogy is perfect. Further, the more I thought about it, the more it made EVERYTHING about Averim work better. When you couple that with the fact that I was reading a really good book about the later Roman Empire named “The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians” by Peter Heather at the time, Averim switched from a Germanic empire to a Roman one almost overnight.

Now, as to the orcs. Their culture and history is far larger than I want to spend time on here, but that off-hand comment about how the orcs were like medieval barbarians changed them as well. I had always drawn from a scattering of influences for the orcs, ranging from the Native Americans of the Great Plains, to the clan cultures of Battletech, to the Shadows of J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5, but one other factor influences them as well.

Remember: the Empire of Averim is made up of lands that originally belonged to the orcs, and that reminded me of another example from our own history. In the later portions of the middle ages, the Spanish spent decades re-capturing their country from the Moors. This was a prefect example, I thought, of how the orcs would view the humans of Averim – dangerous outsiders who needed to be thrown out; or, as the orc motto says, “To Take Back What Is Ours.”

With that, the basic conflict of the southern half of the continent was born, and with it the plot for ADWD…..

Future posts in this area will talk about the nations of the world, their cultures, and their history. I will be posting these on weeks when I’m not releasing new chapters of the novel, and hopefully, these posts will both whet your appetite, and explain some of the thought process that went into the building of the world. Maybe you’ll learn something along the way, for I’ll discuss politics and history along with writing and role-playing, but I guarantee it will be interesting.

NEXT UP: Averic History 101