A bit of Worldbuilding

• AN: Something a little different, I thought I give y'all a peak behind the curtain, so to speak. With the holidays and the world as it currently is, I decided to show you the first step an idle thought might take, before it ever becomes a story. In this case, the idle thought was about an old D&D-Character of mine, Half-Elf, Half-Dragon, Dragonblood Sorcerer, while reading a contemporary novel. The idea coalesced a little bubbled around in my mind and I decided to write down a bit and, for once, to share one of the first stumbling steps a story might take. Not sure if I ever go anywhere with it, or if it will land in the pile of ideas that never went anywhere. Who knows. But maybe someone will enjoy my slightly random thoughts.
• In any case, stay safe and enjoy your holidays as much as possible. 

The Connected Planes

There are countless planes of existence, not in a neat stack but in a messy pile, as if a set of cards has been spilled and nobody ever bothered to clean it up. Some of the planes overlap, others are merely close together, close enough to jump from one to the next in fact. If you have the magic to do so, at least. Finally, the Far Realms, out of reach for all but the most powerful of spellcasters and a place where nobody ever dares to tread lightly. Each plane has its own rules and, maybe more important, its own inhabitants.

With countless planes, countless ways to go from one plane to the other, conflict is nigh inevitable and, for eons, conflict raged, Dragons fighting against Fey, Demons fighting against Celestials, Mantids fighting against Moon-Touched, Night-Borne fighting against the Nature Souls and Giants fighting against Elementals, and many more. That is, if the various races weren’t fighting amongst themselves or, at times, banding together to push back some force from the Far Realms. Humans, you ask?

Humans are, in many ways, the lucky bunch, occupying the lowest rung of the magical ladder, hailing from the plane with the weakest inherent magic, the least resources, which meant that nobody had a desire to mess with them. Why bother invading a place that has nothing you are interested in nothing worth defending if anyone would want to take it. If you wanted to set yourself up with your own realm, there were many planes without natives but with magical resources that made possessing them worthwhile. Not so the Human Realm.

But, what the other races forgot, was that Necessity is the mother of innovation. If a bear threatens to eat your family, innovation means to get a pointy stick. If you, alone, are unable to deal with the bear, you get your twenty friends together, all with their own pointy sticks.

If a bear “threatens” to eat a dragon, the dragon laughs and enjoys dinner.

Where humans had to struggle, to develop ways to cooperate instead of dominate, design methods to advance knowledge and share discovery until, finally, they managed to build their own tower, brick by brick, small advance by small advance. And from that tower, they could look the other races into the eyes. Individually, humans were still pathetically weak, their strongest barely a match for the weakest of the other races, if at all, but they had something the others lacked. Cooperation, guile and a careful approach allowed them to overcome their weakness, both physical and magical.

Carefully approaching the other races, each of them individually, they managed to convince enough of the different racial leaders to sign agreements, the individual leaders thinking that they had been handed dominion over the Human Realm, while giving them the duty to defend it. By the time the different races realised that all of them had “dominion” over the human realm, they all had given their word to defend it. Their own word, enforced by their own magic.

Instead of a weak realm, ignored simply because there was nothing worth taking, the human realm was suddenly a guaranteed neutral ground, where no race could simply ignore the local laws, without flaunting the Given Word of their racial Overlord.

And if anyone thought that such an act would be without consequence, they would have to think twice. At least if they were caught.

The different Races:

Humans, as said above, physically weak and, on average, magically weak.

But, just because the average human is magically a 10, doesn’t mean that there are no outliers, with a magical range between 1 (no magic ability at all) to 1000

Cooperation is the name of the game, the scientific study of magic and its effects, allowing a well-educated, young human to match a much older member of the other races, who learned from their parents or had to figure things out themselves

Dragons, physically powerful and infused with elemental magic, to the point that magic is part of them. Can grow to enormous size, only limited by the amount of magic in their surroundings, on their home-realm they can grow to the size of mountains, given enough time. Their reliance on magic greatly limits their numbers, as it requires massive magical investment from their parents to create an egg and fertilise it, including a delicate mix between elemental and arcane mana that is only found on their home-plane. Considering some sort of complete sex-less society, with dragons only being seen as adults once they have mastered their shape-shifting to be able to serve as both egg-breeder and egg-fertiliser, with the more powerful of them serving as breeder to give them the strongest possible children. Might be interesting to create a society based on that (also, see thoughts that made me think of this world, later)

Fey, diverse realm of Sidhe, Fairies and so on (maybe Orcs as well, essentially Neanderthals taken from Earth and bred as shock-troops)

Ruled by Sidhe, who are dependant on their connection to the Nature of their realm, essentially immortal as long as that bond remains and infusing them with massive amounts of arcane power, boosting them to stand on par with all the other races

Demons, eh, not sure, likely relatively normal, the usual combination of physical strength, cunning and arcane magic specialised in illusion or something, not sure

Celestials, mirror of Demons, both species having had a bit of a proxy-war on earth in the past, using human mages to fight and spread their influence (no, there is no god)

Mantids, hive-mind insect people, just to have something other than mammal-analogues and dragons

Moon-Touched - Yay, Werewolves. And foxes, bears, whatever else I feel like making into shape-shifting beast-people.

Night-Bourne - Yay, Vampires. Maybe also shuffling in some other mythical creatures into them, some things that go bump in the night. Not sure

Nature-Souls - elves? Maybe? Not sure if they would even be a thing or if I’d just fold them into the Fey

Giants - Well, duh. Human bumped hips with elemental or something, similar to dragons in that they are big, physically strong and have an innate connection with a single element. Might fold dwarves into the category, simply because having “dwarves” that are between two and three meters tall but called “dwarves” because other giants are somewhere between three and five meters tall makes me chuckle. Also, Dwarves - Earth/Mountain Giants, would be fitting. Allows to have Dwarves make their cities gigantic in case the other giant-clans visit. Not sure yet

Elementals - Almost purely magical, some even entirely magical without a physical body at all. Sentient clusters of elemental power, not sure what to do with them

Maybe some “mirror-image” for Elementals, made up from Arcane-Energy (essentially pure, unflavoured magic or something) not sure

Story-Idea that got me started on world-building

Half-Dragon, child of Human (archmage or something) and dragon, dragon-mommy felt that there was no way to give birth to her child but was not willing to let her child die, went into the dragon-realm to give birth but had to use all her magic doing so. died from it

Grandmommy Dragon took the child in and raised it, sacrifice of mommy-dragon didn’t work out as planned, half-dragon has both an innate human-body and a dragon-body the size of her mother, with the innate power of that body.

Grandmommy Dragon lives on Earth, as an early adopter of curious human technology, having come over to Earth with the family, including Mommy Dragon, and jumped on that new, booming nation, America. Stayed there ever since, enjoys making money or something, might give dragons an innate desire to Hoard something. Maybe money for Grandmommy Dragon, not sure yet.

Story mostly about child-dragon and their transition from Home-Schooled and living in Grandmommies Hoard to growing up, going to University and so on.