Building Merithaya: The First Continent Part 2

Hello again! Today’s post continues where we left off, building our first continent! This post will name the continent, then consider some of the regions of the continent, before we move on and look at each of these regions in detail in the next series of posts.

Naming A Continent

In the last post we came up with a great map of… somewhere! We can’t keep calling it “The First Continent”, so we need a name.

Usually at this point I turn to the fantastic Fantasy Name Generators website, and this time is no exception. Navigating to their Continent names generator, it just takes a few clicks to find some good raw materials. I personally find for my tastes I usually need to tweak these starting points a bit - both to find something that sounds interesting, as well as trying to avoid coming too close to anything real world or previously used. (This isn’t by any means a hard requirement in most cases - feel free to reuse names you like in your worlds, assuming you aren’t publishing them - I just like having something unique!)

A few vowel substitutions later, and we have our continent name: The Islands of Ionalon! This is great for now - nice alliteration, and has slight similarities to Avalon which conjurs the imagary of a magic-soaked land that I’m hoping for here. We might change it later, but it’s a good starting point!

Diving Into Regions

Our next and final step in the big picture work of creating Ionalon (before we dive into more of the details) is to work out what countries and regions are present here.

We’ve already done a bit of this in dividing up the biomes last time. For countries though, we need to start to think about the politics and history of the area. This will tie in to our overall aims for the continent that we mentioned last time - I want a few countries, maybe only 2 or 3 by the time our story begins here, and a large amount of magic present in the region, potentially as a result of a magical war. This lets us draft up a basic outline of what might have happened to get us where we are now…

The History of Ionalon

Once upon a time, the great island nation of Ionalon was ruled by 6 kingdoms. Each left the others to their own, and prospered in the peace. However, it was not to last.

Things began to falter when the island city-state of Nythfalion discovered a magical portal. None now are sure where this portal came from - some say the mages of Nythfalion summoned it themselves as the culmination of years of magical study, others say it was an experiment gone wrong. Regardless, this gateway led to worlds with riches and wonders beyond anything that the peoples of Ionalon had ever known before.

Nythfalion hoarded its newfound wealth jealously, and traded sparsely with the outside kingdoms. Envy of this bounty grew, before eventually each of the other 5 kingdoms decided they would take this prize for themselves.

A war broke out - rising in scale as alliances were formed and were broken in turn. The mages of Nythfalion defended their city with arcane might, but this in turn sparked a magical arms race that threw the conflict into an even harsher, more dangerous phase. Not much is known now of these last battles of the war, only that the impact they left on the landscape of Ionalon is still being seen to this day. Three of the kingdoms were destroyed completely - the Leaf Sages of Veridia in the south unleashing a final gambit that would see the entire southern landmass of Ionalon become overrun with a wild and dangerous forest, the Empire of Preyalor shattered and conquered in the west, and of the country of Estain in the east nothing remains but a volcanic wasteland.

It was this final act that drove the remaining countries - Aespy'ar, Juthilyl, and Nythfalion - to form a tenuous treaty that, for the moment, still stands…

There we go! I’m not sure yet whether these will be final place names, but these are good stand-ins for the moment. This is sounding like an exciting and interesting place to set a campaign - we have several fallen kingdoms so plenty of ruins and lost cities to explore and lore to find. The highly magical nature of the conflict that ravaged this land gives us huge scope to add in unusual settings formed from the arcane aftermath, and the tension between the remaining kingdoms leads to some potential possible intrigue.

“But Tim!” I hear you say, “this all feels very vague and undetailed! Surely this isn’t all the history this continent has?”
Well, no, but we don’t need to fix that in place to proceed. Part of the joy of worldbuilding (at least for me) is exploring the world for myself - building up the bits I’m interested in, getting to know the different details, trying things, changing them as more get developed. If I spend too long trying to fix this in place now, I’ll be very limited when it comes to that detail further down the road. It’s good to have a broad overview of these things (similar to the pantheon and gods from previously), but we can build up all the great details as we move through the process.

So, with these names decided, we can update our map:

With this, the base of our continent is ready!

Next Steps

This was a shorter post to finish the continent overview. In the next part of the series, we’ll take these regions in turn, adding more to the history, culture, scenery, settlements, and peoples found there! This will form the bulk of the Building Merithaya series, as I expect this continent to be the focal point of the world we build here. If you’d like to follow along on that journey, be sure to subscribe to get the latest posts when they’re published!

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