Assimilation - Development

In the world of Assimilation, the people and the planet they live on have been assimilated. People are born with rocks, grass, wood, sand, etc. as part of their bodies, and the land features cliffs made of bone, deserts made of skin, rivers flowing with blood, etc. Regular natural resources like wood and stone are rare, and are found more often on people than on the planet. Resource wars and trade wars are common and the dead are harvested for their bodies.

Creating the countries and cultures of this world was the task I put the most effort into, with all other aspects of creation tying back into the geography of the countries and the culture of the people who live there. Things like the planetary conditions, flora & fauna, factions & organizations, weather, biomes, government, and all other interactions were created with respect to the cultures of the world and a case was created for how each one relates.

I used the commercial map creation tool Inkarnate to create the maps of this world, and tried to make it adhere to realism and still allow for realistic cultural basins to develop. This was one of the largest tasks of the project, and I put a lot of time into making it look right. I had to study how to create realistic geographical features, taking things like tectonic plates, ocean currents, mountains, glaciers, climates, volcanoes, and more into account.

Each country/culture in this world was created to be defined by the biomes within their borders/cultural basin. Therefore, each one has its unique biomes to itself, while still being relatively nearby each other. Each biome is based off of a normal real-world biome, but each with an eldritchly-horrific twist to fit in with the high concept for the world. I used these twists as a starting point to build the cultures' resources and values off of.

I designed the ecologies of the world after creating the world's conditions and cultural ties to the biomes, so the ecologies had to be created to fit nicely into the pre-existing content. Because all the unique elements of this world are real-world elements with a horrific twist, each plant and animal I created followed the same process. 

The final part of this world I created was a story treatment to help in pitching it to industry professionals. After creating this whole world, I wanted to create a story that captured the themes of the world in a way that was easier to process than an entire world bible. At the same time, however, I didn't want it to dominate too much of the world bible document, since it's right at the beginning, so it's pretty short and surface-level. I want to go back and work on it some more sometime soon.