Fathomsverse

I love worldbuilding.

I love it in all its forms - I love brainstorming the first ideas (should it be a desert world? What colour is the sky? Is there magic?), I love researching all the relevant information (no, seriously, I enjoy reading about the process of making table-salt, really), I love tinkering with every single imaginable thing about an imaginary world.

I think worldbuilding might be the greatest joy and strength of speculative fiction.

... Which is probably why I do so much of it. I tend to dig pretty deep, and get stuck in the most unlikely of places.


The Moonface tribe began as a brainless doodle while I was having a slow day - I just put pencil to paper and let it run away with me. What came out was a squint-eyed axolotl-looking creature. They'd show up in the background in future chapters of my fanzine, Fathoms of the Sky, I decided. And then I resolved not to think about them any more.

But my brain does not work that way. I kept coming back to those little albino lizards, and kept tugging at the little details - and now I've got the beginnings of not only a people, but a culture and a religion.

The marks on their foreheads are echoes of the phases of the moon - and those phases are important to their culture. Their religion is based around them, and the advocates of said religion are known as Speakers for the Moon - astronomer-priests. The full moon and the black, empty moon are two sides of the same coin, and its Speakers constantly in conflict. The Speakers for the White Moon are not morally good, nor are the Speakers for the Black Moon morally evil - I didn't want it to be that simple. Instead, they represent two ways of looking at the world, both with their benefits and their drawbacks, and the Moonface Tribe is split more or less down the middle in two camps, each following one side of the religion.

And voilá, I had not just some lizard-people populating the backgrounds of my comic panels, but a whole race of people with the potential for dozens of comics all by themselves. They even come with their own built-in conflict!

Thankfully, they aren't demanding that much space in Fathoms, or I'd never get it done.

Daily sketchbook dump Sept. 6-10

Entirely Fathoms-focused! How 'bout that? Warning: babble follows.

I've been worldbuilding lately, because as a world, Fathoms is pretty empty. There was just Talassa and Gale, and that four-armed Whalerider guy who would turn up in chapter three. I've been playing around a bit with the Whalerider people (as evidenced by my earlier sketchdumps), but I decided they needed some more people.

So, I invented the Moonface-tribe.


It started as a doodle, which grew into something more - and it was only after drawing a few of them that I realised they all looked like fat axolotls.

Then I started thinking about the markings on their foreheads.

All of the markings are simplified phases of the moon. Children have crescent moons, adults have half-moons and the ones I've labelled as "Speakers" have full moons. Male Moonfaces have moon-markings that curve to the left, while female Moonfaces' curve to the right, to set them apart. It's definitely easier for non-Moonfaces to identify them that way, since they otherwise have no outward physical traits setting them apart.

The Moonfaces are divided in two main factions - the White Moon and the Black Moon. And no, the Black Moon-faction is NOT evil. They just represent another way of living, the same way an eclipse represents another phase of the moon.

I haven't completely figured out what the different factions stand for, but I'll get there. It's fun to play around with politics and religion and imaginary societies.



I've also been tinkering with the plot, and have decided that in some future chapter, a Seer is going to turn up. Below are my initial ideas for the Seer's design: