I ended up not posting a Worldbuilding Wednesday last week, as some of you may have noticed. I probably had a good reason at the time, but to be honest I genuinely can’t remember what it was. Oh well! In the end, skipping a post turned out to be a good choice because my worldbuilding stream last Sunday ended up continuing the topic I worked on the week before, so it made sense to just do one post for both of them. Let me tell you a bit about what I worked on!
The Azemian Church
I had a lot of fun these last two streams constructing my first somewhat fleshed out religion for Erziyye. I have had some ideas for what sort of faiths exist in various regions for a while but they’ve all very much been in the “rough concept” stage – until now. Now, I have a fair idea of a lot of the fundamentals of the Azemian Church – its history and founder, how it has spread in the region where it’s now the dominant faith, what it’s important texts are, what sorts of ideals and moral principles are central to it and how the church is organized. It’s by new means a fully developed religion. It’s missing a lot of details in the aforementioned arenas, and some things (like rituals and holidays, for example) I haven’t worked on at all, but it’s off to a solid start!
The Azemian Church is central to a stand-alone romance novel (or novella, who knows?) I want to write eventually, but as I worked on it I realized it had a wider relevance outside of that story.
Connecting Dots
The story idea that birthed the Azemian Church is fairly old, and one that just hasn’t been high enough on my list of priorities to get drafted. That’s no issue – when you have as many story ideas as I do, at any given time most of them are not being actively worked on. The way I see it, worldbuilding is still worldbuilding and developing any part of my conworlds will serve the conworld as whole, so I don’t limit my building to things relevant to my most prioritized stories.
That being said, I was pretty thrilled when partway through my stream I realize that the mental image I had of this religion actually fit pretty danged well with another story that is slightly higher on my list of priorities, and which also has religion as a fairly central part of the story. Particularly the notions of morality as it relates to sexuality, gender and the like were pretty similar in both ideas, so after sleeping on it a few nights between the first and second stream I decided to just make it canon (in my head) that they’re the same. After all, I’m probably only going to develop so many religions for Erziyye, so it makes sense not to have two of them be too similar. And to be honest, it’s also really exciting to see two pieces of this huge jigsaw puzzle of mine connecting.
Next (Tea) Time
I haven’t published a World Anvil article on the Azemian Church yet – the notes I took need some serious cleaning up before they’re fit for general consumption. But I do intend to start on the article soon, and when it’s finished I’ll link to it in that week’s Worldbuilding Wednesday post.
I very much look forward to my next Tea Time stream on Sunday. I haven’t picked a topic yet, but I’ve given myself a sharp deadline for that on Saturday afternoon so I’m sure it’ll be something interesting! Always happy to take suggestions in the comment section, too!
Until next time, take care everyone!