Alkainos has been around in one form or another for a long time. Like a lot of personal fantasy worlds, it has also spent long periods sitting in notebooks, files and half-finished ideas while real life got on with other things.

I made a brief attempt last year to start documenting some of it here. I wrote about Aurenheim, experimented with languages and put together an introduction to the mythology. Then the site went quiet again.

The world itself didn’t.

Over the last few months I’ve come back to Alkainos much more seriously. Some old ideas have survived almost untouched. Others have been renamed, pulled apart or quietly discarded. Large areas of the map that once existed as little more than names are beginning to acquire an identity of their own. More importantly, I’m trying to make all of that development serve stories rather than simply accumulating more lore.

A world with room left in it

One of the more useful lessons has been learning not to fill every blank.

Recently I’ve been making broad development passes across the main countries of Alkainos. Palcia, for example, is becoming a compact but influential western kingdom built around an Italian inspiration: prosperous farmland and maritime cities, the physical remains of a much larger former empire, and a powerful Church whose influence extends well beyond Palcia’s modern borders. Printing is beginning to give religious dissent a reach it didn’t previously have.

There is plenty more I could define immediately: the old empire’s exact history, the Church hierarchy, the ruling dynasty, military organisation, individual cities and dozens of other details. For now, much of that is deliberately being left open.

That’s quite a change from my instinct when I first started building fantasy settings. It is very easy to mistake detail for depth. A country doesn’t necessarily become more useful because I’ve answered every question about it. I need enough to understand what makes Palcia different from its neighbours and what sorts of conflicts and stories naturally belong there. The rest can develop when something actually needs it.

The same principle is starting to apply to the mythology. I have a much clearer idea now of the gods, the realms beyond the mortal world and some of the events that shaped Alkainos. But knowing something as the person building the world doesn’t mean it needs to be explained to a reader — or even known by the people living there.

I’d rather reveal that world through stories than turn it into an encyclopaedia.

Back to maps, too

I’ve also gone back to drawing maps by hand.

That probably sounds like a backwards step given the number of digital mapping tools available, but it has been surprisingly useful. A pencil map is easy to change. Coastlines can move, borders can be reconsidered and a city can disappear under an eraser without feeling as though I’m destroying finished work.

It also forces me to think about geography rather than decoration: where mountains actually run, where rivers ought to flow, how far apart places are and what those distances mean for travel and trade.

Eventually there will be a definitive digital map. I’m in no hurry to make one while the world is still moving underneath it.

And, finally, fiction

This is the part that matters most.

I’ve spent years accumulating fragments of Alkainos: countries, gods, cities, historical events, characters and story ideas. The danger is that worldbuilding becomes the hobby and the stories remain permanently somewhere over the horizon.

So the current work is increasingly being tested against fiction. A setting detail earns its keep when it creates pressure on a character, complicates an investigation, makes a journey possible or impossible, or gives somebody a reason to act.

One strand I’m developing at the moment begins quite deliberately at a smaller scale: people whose work brings them into contact with supernatural disturbances that most inhabitants of Alkainos would prefer to avoid. That gives me a way into the darker parts of the setting without beginning with gods explaining the universe to one another. The larger mythology is there, but it can stay behind the curtain until the story has a reason to pull it aside.

That feels like a much better route into Alkainos.

So what is this site now?

I’m going to use this blog as a window onto that development rather than trying to turn it into a definitive public wiki.

Some posts will probably be about places. Others might follow a map taking shape, a piece of mythology changing, the development of a story, artwork, languages, or an idea that seemed promising and then failed completely. Some things shown here will inevitably change later. I’ll try to be clear when something is exploratory rather than settled.

I’m also using AI extensively as part of the current development process — for exploration, criticism, organisation, artwork and writing support. Alkainos predates generative AI by many years, and the decisions about what belongs in the world remain mine, but AI has made it practical for me to pick up a sprawling old project and work on it at a scale I simply wasn’t managing before. I’ll write more about that process separately rather than making every Alkainos post about the tools used to build it.

For now, the aim here is simpler: show the world while it is being made.

There should be rather more to show this time.