My blog over the past couple of week has been all about the creation of the landscape for The Bremmand Chronicles. It is one of fun parts of narrative fiction – inventing your own geography. It isn’t just the geography either – it’s the society too. So, having created the Kingdom, I also had to fill it with people.
In the development of the plot for Line of Duty I had created a religion which rather required three distinct and different races to make it up. I made my three races easily distinguishable from one another, so the indigenous population – the woodsmen – are big framed, tall, red-haired and strong; the Langatians are fair of hair and face; and the Bremmandish are tall and slender and have dark hair and eyes.
Since the setting is medieval, it is reasonable to assume that people don’t move around all that much so the genetic similarities would remain and therefore it is possible to keep the three ‘types’ clearly distinct. I have assumed some degree of migration, though – otherwise everyone ends up looking the same and, from a purely practical writing perspective, it makes descriptions hard work!
Having created those three racial groups in Bremmand, I added in a few more. People near the western borders have black hair – which I can explain by them close to another nation – and where there has been migration, other looks arrive.
It proved to be quite fun, looking at my map, seeing where there might be different populations and how they might have inter-bred together.
And, of course, once you make the basic premise of the books an invasion from another continent, all sorts of additional fun can be had!!!
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