Stellanea—The Origins: world building, lore and quest creation
In Polish, we have a saying, “even Salomon won’t pour from an empty cup,” which is equivalent to “you can't squeeze water from a stone.” Ideas for evocative, imaginative text don’t appear out of thin air either. When I come up with a concept for a character, I prepare a short introduction and start thinking about their origins. Creating a Word Bank maps the qualities and properties so that I don’t even need to write a full story to have a sense of who they are, what world they represent, and what tone the lore will take on.
Let me show you The Origins of Stellanea and the worldbuilding, welded from this simple yet effective exercise.
I'm standing at what some may call the apex of today's society and...everywhere I look—augmented bodies. Augmented faces. Augmented personalities. The world is drowning in artificial powers, expanding so fast it forgot to ask if I wanted to come along. Yet, somewhere amongst nebulous realms and stellar interconnections, a divine Sovereign is about to be born. A celestial aegis that will encompass the Earth and any living beings in this vast Universe and will commence the quest of balancing the forces of happiness and sorrow. This world we live in is a cradle that sways into extremes and rarely achieves a peaceful state. From millions of years of our history, we learned that nothing serene can flourish without knowing the draining power of chaos. Yet, in every trial of renaissance we start bathing in such sluggish and uninspired softness that we lose the fire that heats creativity and change.
________
I found the earliest mentions of the Two Empyrean Artifacts, engraved on a silver plaque at the entrance to the Starlit Promenade at our First Orbital Base around Mars:
“The Shattered Silicon Chip is an artifact of the Artificial Society, which allowed tech innovations to completely control them. The Twin Celestial Halos are receivers of an encompassing power of the Stellar Realms, which distant galactic beings gifted the last Earthly Survivors to heal the artificially devoured humans on the Planet Earth. Together, these two special objects create the Terrestrial Equilibrium. This balanced conduit aims to revive the hostage part of the Earth's society while seamlessly balancing them with the civilization of the Survivors. The one who will bring both artifacts to the hidden Stellar Oracle Wellspring in the Luma Galaxy will activate the conduit and allow the Galaxy infinite peace.”
The first artifact is held in the North Historic Gallery, which the Starlit Promenade leads to. Nobody from the Base has ever seen the Twin Celestial Halos, but the elderly civilians of the Survivors hold countless holographic images of their existence. It's the last hope to awaken the part of the Artificial Society or Users that made themselves immortal by allowing silicon chips to calibrate their physiology. These people lost their sense of purpose and are just nothing more than robotic beings that repeat the same mundane tasks that produce heaps of electronic tokens. They are completely stripped of any joy and humanness. They receive merely a dopamine shock from a completed task. Additionally, the pollution they emit poisons nearby planets and stars.
Allegedly, the Twin Celestial Halos once saved the Earth from collapsing and spreading death throughout the Solar System. Yet the power-hungry leaders of the Artificial Society wanted to use the Halos' power for their greedy and inhumane means. They sought to harness the Halos' infinite power to run the General Power Chip (GPC), which allowed for enabling and disabling all Users' chips. But, as you might know from similar stories, the Halos had voidproof power that, instead of powering up, broke the GPC, which we now know as The Shattered Silicon Chip. Anyone in the Artificial Society whose chip was enabled at the time could never return to their natural state and therefore lost their human qualities. When the GPC broke, the Twin Celestial Halos disappeared. Since then, the enabled Users have continued polluting the Earth and, by extension, the Solar System day and night. People who had disabled chips have slowly returned to their humanness and try to fight the pollution the Artificial Society keeps generating. The legends say there is no replacement for the original GPC. Yet, the power of the Twin Celestial Halos can weld it again, allowing the forever-growing Artificial Society to be turned off. The Terrestrial Equilibrium will be a conduit of peace that balances the celestial and natural worlds with the power of continuing technological innovation.
My grandma is one of the elders from the society of the Survivors. She's always been saying that when I turn 30, I need to commence my adventure to find a female heroine who is about to be born from the Astral Forge that happens once in a thousand years in the Luma Galaxy. Expectedly, she should know the location of the Twin Celestial Halos, as they belong to her ancestors who have always used the receivers to save galaxies that, if they fall, can commence chaos in the entire Universe. The heroine's name will be a combination of two Greek words, Stella (star) and new (new)—Stellanea—as once in a thousand years a new star with unwavering healing celestial powers is born to bring homeostasis to the entire Universe.
Now, when we know the origins of the story and the introduction of the Stellanea character, our narrator—protagonist—stands at a crossroads. She needs to interview her 3 companions for the journey. How she decides to speak to them deeply affects the course of the mission and defines the strengths and weaknesses of her crew. Let me break down how this can look:
~ example of a branching dialogue for the first quest of the game
With these choices, we have established the dynamic between the protagonist and her crew, the difficulty of certain quests, and how much lore we will get to explore. It also opens the door to further changes along the way, like the fact that Hyatt and Lira will butt heads. Will we lose a precious companion to a misunderstanding? Or maybe our persuasive skills will win over our companions, who settle down and cooperate, bringing in the story's other surprises along the course of the game.
Creating characters and lore from scratch requires a certain level of knowledge, or at least good research skills. A prior and continuous craving for information from literature, movies, comic books, games, and philosophies has all proven helpful for me to create believable scenarios. Human minds will find truth in patterns they have seen, heard of, or experienced, so I always ground my ideas in possible reality. The better base I establish, the more fantastic and fictional scenarios I feel confident inventing later on. Very often my ideas come from dreamlike realms that have a base in my view of the world and society. I haven’t yet invented a tale where nothing weaves into the world I know, as I love metaphor and leaving some sort of lessons I aim to infuse into the world. When I first created Stellanea, I didn’t mean to invent the whole sci-fi story around her, but, like a lot of simple projects, it has gotten fuel and inspired me for more. What was meant to be a digital character painting became a venture to deepen my storytelling skills, and I have yet to discover what lore it will write for my future.
Thank you for tuning in!