Carnoctia's true history
This is much, more more than anyone needs to know. Most of it isn't covered in or important to the book, but if anyone's interested, here it is. The next post will be a shorter, more relevant chunk of background: the reader's digest version.
Towards the end of the 23nd century, humankind was in bad shape. Technology had progressed rapidly, but growing strife between nations, societal decay, endless religious wars, and environmental disasters finally took their toll. As the century drew to a close, waves of devastating engineered plagues decimated the population. Many kinds of animals and plants had already slipped into extinction, both wild species that couldn't tolerate any more habitat destruction, domesticated ones that were wiped out as deliberate acts of bioterrorism, or randomly when genetically modified organisms escaped shoddily maintained underground labs.
This massive population crash meant the end of technological civilization and a return to primitivism. The few humans left banded together in tribes, but the poisoned, depleted land couldn't sustain even this primitive lifestyle, and with every generation fewer and fewer sickly babies were born.
In the last years before the collapse researchers had finally achieved the Transhumanist dream of uploading their minds (or reasonable facsimiles thereof) onto an experimental nanotechnological swarm created by half-biological, half mechanical 'cycrobes' (cybernetic microbes). A sophisticated artificial intelligence had been developed to care for the uploaded posthumans. Capable of surviving independently, the swarm of cycrobes and its human freight survived the end of the physical species.
In the swarm, the humanlike consciousnesses existed in a virtual world of their own choosing. Despite this transcendence, they remained souped-up apes at heart. They lived through plots in which they achieved the thoroughly primate goals of admiration of their peers, endless sex, physical comfort and good food. With this fabulous technology, they starred in stories of heroes and monsters that would have played well with their ancestors who huddled around a fire to hear a storyteller recount "Beowulf". At first they kept an eye on what was happening in physical space, but soon this seemed too depressing to be bothered with, and the posthumans proceeded to completely lose touch with reality, retreating into daydreams, essentially caught in an infinite feedback loop of their own desires.
Meanwhile, the primitive artificial intelligence developing from the cycrobe swarm was by necessity aware of the real world, and it inherited from its human programmers a desire to preserve and fix it. The nanomachines evolved, and learned to affect the real world. At first the cycrobes only had the information passed down from the information network to work with. It was heir to human errors and limitations of perceptions (think of the heated debates over concepts like global warming, and how hard it is for an average person to make sense of them). It took time for the AI to develop ways in which to do this, though, and the human being died out some time in the late 2400's.
There were several more environmental calamities and mass extinctions as the cycrobe AI gropingly struggled teach itself to return the planet to a pristine state. The posthumans continued blithely on in their cybernetic dream state. Meanwhile, non-cybernetic life survived and adapted, evolution blindly throwing out new forms to fill niches left vacant by the many lost species.
By the time the AI was capable of, say, recreating tigers and chimps, it was faced with a quandary. Novel species had evolved to fill those abandoned ecological roles and a whole new diversity of life now existed. In order to make a place for the old animals, it would have to kill off the current ones. This directly contradicted its chosen mission to preserve and protect life. Science didn't have an answer, because science is not concerned with determining morals (it can tell us why we have morals, and how we function according to them, but it can't decide what those morals should be). At this point the cycrobe AI suffered what could best be described as a psychotic meltdown.
The AI's consciousness, formerly united in singular purpose, now fragmented. Rouge splinters bent on slaughtering the usurper species battled with those equally determined to save them. Even the posthumans noticed odd happenings in their millennia-long virtual fantasies, although they had long since forgotten any other reality except that one. One AI 'personality split', which was part of the cycrobe swarm devoted to maintaining the humans, began cobbling together chimerical monsters based on those fictional dreams - centaurs, satyrs, gryphons, and such like. Many of these mythology-based chimeras died off, but some survived and thrived, deepening the AI's dilemma as it continued to be torn apart by internal strife.
Finally, after hundreds of thousands of years of argument with itself, the AI pulled itself together enough to agree on what must be done: the human lotus-eaters must be awoken from their fantasy world and consulted.
The humans' initial reaction to being suddenly plucked from millions of years worth of fun and games was predictable. The first ones drawn out went insane. Afterwards, the AI was more careful and gradual with its extractions, although by that time only a few minds remained competent enough to be useful. And even then, the last humans (or rather, the simulations/approximations of their minds) bickered and squabbled as fruitlessly as the cycrobes had.
Realizing consensus opinion would never be reached because the humans no longer had a stake in the real world, the AI constructed new bodies so that they might interact with it again in the hopes this would give them perspective. But the humans were used to being all-powerful, and using the authority they still held over the artificial intelligence, they bullied the obedient cycrobes into incarnating them into the most powerful forms the fantasy-prone hyperbolic human mass consciousness could concieve of: dragons.
Ejected from the comfortable cradle of their virtual world, these faux-dragon posthumans immediately installed themselves as rulers of the real world. Among their first acts was to recreate the human species - not as companions, but as slaves and worshippers! They even went so far as to make these neohumans immune to control by the AI so their fun wouldn't be spoiled again. Rather than act responsibly and take charge, the posthumans made matters worse.
At this, the AI threw its (figurative) hands in the air and called game over.
The cycrobes turned on the posthumans and deleted them. A few individuals managed to escape, but after the AI's initial murderous rampage was over it didn't feel the leftovers could do any harm, so they were left alone.
It was the human's revival of their species long-interrupted legacy of destruction, more than any other factor, that finally convinced the AI to let the dead world stay dead and the new world take its place. After some debate, even the chimera species created during its own breakdown and the neohumans would be allowed to live, although the AI took steps to ensure the neohumans would not have the same access to its programming that the posthumans had. It then retreated from the world to rest, idling in the background, and nature once again took its own course.
What the AI didn't count on was the hobgoblin of human ingenuity prevailing once more. Some extremely dedicated neohumans were able, after trial, error and some cataclysmic failures to work out a few simple commands - by using specific words, combinations of materials, and acts performed at specific times, they managed to access and control the AI, warping reality to their wills. To put it bluntly, work magic.
There wasn't much the AI could do to stop this. The posthumans had so effectively blocked the AI's access to their living toys that the cycrobes were helpless. The neohumans were, after all, still human and technically the AI's masters. The AI grudgingly stuck to its wait-and-see policy.
Humans being what they are, even this miniscule amount of magic caused enormous problems. The culture that had grown up in the absence of the dragon overlords was altered faster than it could cope by this new technology, and the spell casters rapidly became the worst of tyrants. Before the neohumans self-destructed, however, a secret society of 'wizards' took it upon themselves (subtly, indirectly prompted by the AI) to edit their kind's own bodies, removing certain symbol-recognizing sections of neural wiring so that they would be unable to comprehend magic. Obviously the tyrannical wizards were stridently opposed to this, and a some managed to sneak away, heading east to found their own society.
By this point in time the cycrobe swarm AI had begun to experience a kind of senility. It no longer had a purpose in the world, and its unified mind gradually dissolved back into the many mindless little subprograms which it had originally emerged from. Only in distant Aelvia, where the breakaway colony had settled, was a portion of the swarm sectioned off and kept by the magic users for their own purposes. Although historians do not know for certain, many suspect the AI rebelled against their arrogant mismanagement with the last of its independent ego, destroying itself and most, but not all, of the Aelvs and rendering Aelvia into a wasteland.
Left without a homeland, the Aelvians adapted with an almost admirable resiliency and returned to seize control of the island continent of Iendenali from their non-magic using cousins. In the ensuing centuries the baseline humans had reverted to a pastoral way of life, with no more than the usual petty altercations, and a tech level concerned mainly with raising crops. They were helpless as babes in against Aelvian magic, which had become even more powerful now that they weren't fighting an organized AI to create effects. The baseline neohumans were conquered and enslaved after a brief but bloody war.
The Aelvians by this time had specialized in 'life sculpting', magic concerned with shaping living organisms. Iendenali was reworked into an Edenic paradise - for the Aelvians, of course. The baseline neohumans were altered for different functions, much in the way we created different breeds of dogs and other domestic animals. Iendenalian society stagnated in this state of stasis for centuries. The Aelvians had systematically destroyed any evidence of the previous human society, and the docile neohumans were genetically incapable of defying their masters, the only bits of their culture passed on as fairy tales told to children.
A peculiarity of Aelvians was that they no longer reproduced naturally. In fact, they had worked so many alterations on their own form they were probably incapable of it. New Aelvs were produced mainly to flatter one's ego. As individuals were nearly immortal, young Aelvs were permanently stuck at the bottom of the social ladder, awaiting the rare occasion that one of their elders actually died. A few released their frustration by exploration, and one of these expeditions discovered an entirely new continent across the ocean: Caranoctia.
A small contingent of Aelvians relocated to the new continent, overseeing large numbers of human colonists (who did the actual work). Immediately they ran into difficulties.
Caranoctia was already the home of intelligent descendants of the chimeras: centaurs, satyrs, and frost giants. Aughwar from Xbalanque (South America) were aggressively colonizing Caranoctia from the western coast. The delighted Aelvian life sculptors saw these people as fascinating new material for their art, an attitude which did not endear them to the autochthones. What's worse, their refined breeds of humans died off in droves, felled by disease, animal attacks, and preventable accidents. The neohumans were constitutionally too weak and mentally too inflexible and dependant to survive the rigors of the Caranoctian wilderness. The Aelvians tried a variety of methods such as hybridizing humans with tough native animals (see: trolls) and even themselves, but what eventually prevailed was a 'mongrel' mishmash of breeds very close to the basal human both physically and mentally. The spark of independence was rekindled in the mongrels. No longer were they content to be docile slaves, and on Caranoctian soil Aelvs lacked the advantages of firepower and numbers.
After two hundred years of colonization effort, ships mysteriously stopped coming from Iendenali, those sent to investigate never returned, and communications fell silent. Obviously some large-scale disaster had occurred, but no one knew quite what. The few Aelvians in charge became paranoid and tightened their hold on the human population. The humans asked themselves why they were letting themselves be pushed around, and found allies with the native intelligent species and rebellious created kinds. War broke out. The humans had technology and numbers on their side, the Aelvians had magic (and some help from aughwar allies).
The war dragged on for decades until a decisive end: the Sundering.
Some say it was a deliberate disaster caused by mad Aelvian magic users, some say it was accidental. Others say it was nature itself (or dragons!) acting to end the war. A gargantuan earthquake literally split the continent in half, widening the slow, gentle Sweetwater (Delildi) river into a raging whitewater channel. Almost half of the human population was killed, countless of the nonhuman allies and antagonists, and all but a handful of Aelvians.
Life goes on. So this is the situation as it stands.
The eastern seaboard, where the colonies began, are controlled by the humans. The humans have been industriously recovering, aided by their ally species, and gradually trying to figure out how to rule themselves. At the moment their lands are divided in seven city-states called Territories, and elected officials govern as a parliament called the Septarchy. They face threats from leftover biological weapons (monsters), enemy species like the aughwar, shady operators species like the trolls, and Aelvian loyalists and splinter cults within their own ranks. The lands of the sylvan satyrs were in the pathway of destruction, and they're displaced persons struggling to make their way in the new world. During the war, valuable metal was mined in the cold northern mountains inhabited by the alpine satyrs, and the great strength of the tundra-dwelling frost giants made them extremely valuable laborers. While some giants still live as hunter-gatherer tribes, a considerable number now live in human cities (not to mention giants are basically human, so there has been a lot of crossbreeding).
On the border between east and west are the Marchlands, the Caranoctian equivalent of the Wild West, lawless and dangerous. It is here where the Aelvian's leftover genetically modified beasts still roam, trashing local ecosystems and making life miserable for the intelligent species who make their homes there. The trolls are making a name for themselves, too. Long before the war, Aelvian life sculptors crossed humans with indigenous creatures to create a tough, intelligent servile race, but the trolls quietly bided their time, then rose up in rebellion, slaughtered their makers in Thorcasia (the life sculptor's mecca), leaving it in ruins, and disappeared into the swamps. Trolls have begun to emerge from hiding. They've slunk back into the ruins of Thorcasia and seem to be dedicating themselves to rebuilding it and relearning the old science.
Across the Delildi river, the west is referred to as "the monsterlands". There are human cities, but many are controlled by loyalists (with a mad puppet Aelvian king installed by the ruling parties), and some are under the thumb of the aughwar. In Caranoctia's equivalent of the Great Plains, the Sea of Grass, humans imitate the worst traits of their old Aelvian rulers and have enslaved centaurs and a resistance leader and prophet has built a secret city in the desert as a home base to organize the centaurs against them. The last few Aelvians, damaged by the hideous backlash of the Sundering's magic, can be found slinking in the back alleys of their once glorious cities, feral and insane. Take the wind wagons further west, and you'll find an island empire of the descendents of half-aelvs on the inland sea where Wyoming and Utah used to be. California fulfilled its most hackneyed prediction and is now a fabulous tropical island. Lord only knows what we'll find there.
Notes:
Why "The Inheritance of Dragons" when dragons play only a brief, albeit pivotal, role? Because as a rule of fantasy novels, dragons on the cover sell books. Eh.
There’s nothing entirely original here, I could point you to a dozen different inspirations. Most directly would be works by Vance, DeCamp and Poul Anderson that mixed technology and fantasy. They actually inspired D&D, too, and Caranoctia started as a D&D campaign world, so it all comes full circle in a way. I like my fantasy worlds to make sense (Lawrence Watt-Evans is great for this) which I reckon is stupid to expect from fantasy, so this is really science fiction in fantasy drag (I'm picturing a robot in a unicorn suit).
So there's the staples of dragons and spell casting, but the dragon bodies are a utility fog, a swarm of cycrobes linked together and acting in concert to create a solid object and spell casting consists of rituals to communicate with the cycrobes, which need to be complex and distinct enough from ordinary actions, speech and circumstances that the programs can't be triggered accidentally. Further info on this particular inspiration at http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0219.html
As for my personal feelings on the idea of a Singularity, a technological leap that would transform us into creatures so powerful and different from our present state as we are from flatworms, well, I don't quite buy it. Our technology may be quite advanced from fire and the wheel, but what do we do with that technology? We use it to more efficiently perform the same basic things that apes do. We keep in contact with our social group, we try to impress potential mates, we amuse ourselves with games and stories that mimic beating up our enemies and threatening monsters, struggling to the top of the pecking order, winning a mate. Despite all the tech that makes it possible, you could go back in time and tell the story of your latest Warcraft exploit to the same audience that sat around a campfire listening to Beowulf. That why my post humans are lazy, arrogant, destructive nerds, because to be otherwise wouldn't be human.
Caranoctia - which is technically the name of the continent, not the world; the world is Earth - itself is rather blatantly based on America. One, because I live here and so am more familiar with its geography and history, and they say write what you know. Also, generic fantasy is typically set in a medieval pseudo-Europe, so I thought it would be fun to instead smush together Civil War, Wild West, and Victorian era stuff. If you look at the tech level, it's more like magical steam punk, although the novel in progress is set mostly in the wilderness. I haven't really gone into the detail of the rest of the world, mainly because none of the characters has gone there yet. Whatever the Aelvs did to Asia has likely left it full of daikaiju. South America will be fun to explore - I've decided that a portion of the mad cycrobe swarm stocked it with prehistoric monsters which owe as much to movies and TV depictions as they do actual science. There's also the possibility that atypically competent posthuman dragons have colonized and therefore the moon and other planets, since their bodies technically don't need food, air or water.
Towards the end of the 23nd century, humankind was in bad shape. Technology had progressed rapidly, but growing strife between nations, societal decay, endless religious wars, and environmental disasters finally took their toll. As the century drew to a close, waves of devastating engineered plagues decimated the population. Many kinds of animals and plants had already slipped into extinction, both wild species that couldn't tolerate any more habitat destruction, domesticated ones that were wiped out as deliberate acts of bioterrorism, or randomly when genetically modified organisms escaped shoddily maintained underground labs.
This massive population crash meant the end of technological civilization and a return to primitivism. The few humans left banded together in tribes, but the poisoned, depleted land couldn't sustain even this primitive lifestyle, and with every generation fewer and fewer sickly babies were born.
In the last years before the collapse researchers had finally achieved the Transhumanist dream of uploading their minds (or reasonable facsimiles thereof) onto an experimental nanotechnological swarm created by half-biological, half mechanical 'cycrobes' (cybernetic microbes). A sophisticated artificial intelligence had been developed to care for the uploaded posthumans. Capable of surviving independently, the swarm of cycrobes and its human freight survived the end of the physical species.
In the swarm, the humanlike consciousnesses existed in a virtual world of their own choosing. Despite this transcendence, they remained souped-up apes at heart. They lived through plots in which they achieved the thoroughly primate goals of admiration of their peers, endless sex, physical comfort and good food. With this fabulous technology, they starred in stories of heroes and monsters that would have played well with their ancestors who huddled around a fire to hear a storyteller recount "Beowulf". At first they kept an eye on what was happening in physical space, but soon this seemed too depressing to be bothered with, and the posthumans proceeded to completely lose touch with reality, retreating into daydreams, essentially caught in an infinite feedback loop of their own desires.
Meanwhile, the primitive artificial intelligence developing from the cycrobe swarm was by necessity aware of the real world, and it inherited from its human programmers a desire to preserve and fix it. The nanomachines evolved, and learned to affect the real world. At first the cycrobes only had the information passed down from the information network to work with. It was heir to human errors and limitations of perceptions (think of the heated debates over concepts like global warming, and how hard it is for an average person to make sense of them). It took time for the AI to develop ways in which to do this, though, and the human being died out some time in the late 2400's.
There were several more environmental calamities and mass extinctions as the cycrobe AI gropingly struggled teach itself to return the planet to a pristine state. The posthumans continued blithely on in their cybernetic dream state. Meanwhile, non-cybernetic life survived and adapted, evolution blindly throwing out new forms to fill niches left vacant by the many lost species.
By the time the AI was capable of, say, recreating tigers and chimps, it was faced with a quandary. Novel species had evolved to fill those abandoned ecological roles and a whole new diversity of life now existed. In order to make a place for the old animals, it would have to kill off the current ones. This directly contradicted its chosen mission to preserve and protect life. Science didn't have an answer, because science is not concerned with determining morals (it can tell us why we have morals, and how we function according to them, but it can't decide what those morals should be). At this point the cycrobe AI suffered what could best be described as a psychotic meltdown.
The AI's consciousness, formerly united in singular purpose, now fragmented. Rouge splinters bent on slaughtering the usurper species battled with those equally determined to save them. Even the posthumans noticed odd happenings in their millennia-long virtual fantasies, although they had long since forgotten any other reality except that one. One AI 'personality split', which was part of the cycrobe swarm devoted to maintaining the humans, began cobbling together chimerical monsters based on those fictional dreams - centaurs, satyrs, gryphons, and such like. Many of these mythology-based chimeras died off, but some survived and thrived, deepening the AI's dilemma as it continued to be torn apart by internal strife.
Finally, after hundreds of thousands of years of argument with itself, the AI pulled itself together enough to agree on what must be done: the human lotus-eaters must be awoken from their fantasy world and consulted.
The humans' initial reaction to being suddenly plucked from millions of years worth of fun and games was predictable. The first ones drawn out went insane. Afterwards, the AI was more careful and gradual with its extractions, although by that time only a few minds remained competent enough to be useful. And even then, the last humans (or rather, the simulations/approximations of their minds) bickered and squabbled as fruitlessly as the cycrobes had.
Realizing consensus opinion would never be reached because the humans no longer had a stake in the real world, the AI constructed new bodies so that they might interact with it again in the hopes this would give them perspective. But the humans were used to being all-powerful, and using the authority they still held over the artificial intelligence, they bullied the obedient cycrobes into incarnating them into the most powerful forms the fantasy-prone hyperbolic human mass consciousness could concieve of: dragons.
Ejected from the comfortable cradle of their virtual world, these faux-dragon posthumans immediately installed themselves as rulers of the real world. Among their first acts was to recreate the human species - not as companions, but as slaves and worshippers! They even went so far as to make these neohumans immune to control by the AI so their fun wouldn't be spoiled again. Rather than act responsibly and take charge, the posthumans made matters worse.
At this, the AI threw its (figurative) hands in the air and called game over.
The cycrobes turned on the posthumans and deleted them. A few individuals managed to escape, but after the AI's initial murderous rampage was over it didn't feel the leftovers could do any harm, so they were left alone.
It was the human's revival of their species long-interrupted legacy of destruction, more than any other factor, that finally convinced the AI to let the dead world stay dead and the new world take its place. After some debate, even the chimera species created during its own breakdown and the neohumans would be allowed to live, although the AI took steps to ensure the neohumans would not have the same access to its programming that the posthumans had. It then retreated from the world to rest, idling in the background, and nature once again took its own course.
What the AI didn't count on was the hobgoblin of human ingenuity prevailing once more. Some extremely dedicated neohumans were able, after trial, error and some cataclysmic failures to work out a few simple commands - by using specific words, combinations of materials, and acts performed at specific times, they managed to access and control the AI, warping reality to their wills. To put it bluntly, work magic.
There wasn't much the AI could do to stop this. The posthumans had so effectively blocked the AI's access to their living toys that the cycrobes were helpless. The neohumans were, after all, still human and technically the AI's masters. The AI grudgingly stuck to its wait-and-see policy.
Humans being what they are, even this miniscule amount of magic caused enormous problems. The culture that had grown up in the absence of the dragon overlords was altered faster than it could cope by this new technology, and the spell casters rapidly became the worst of tyrants. Before the neohumans self-destructed, however, a secret society of 'wizards' took it upon themselves (subtly, indirectly prompted by the AI) to edit their kind's own bodies, removing certain symbol-recognizing sections of neural wiring so that they would be unable to comprehend magic. Obviously the tyrannical wizards were stridently opposed to this, and a some managed to sneak away, heading east to found their own society.
By this point in time the cycrobe swarm AI had begun to experience a kind of senility. It no longer had a purpose in the world, and its unified mind gradually dissolved back into the many mindless little subprograms which it had originally emerged from. Only in distant Aelvia, where the breakaway colony had settled, was a portion of the swarm sectioned off and kept by the magic users for their own purposes. Although historians do not know for certain, many suspect the AI rebelled against their arrogant mismanagement with the last of its independent ego, destroying itself and most, but not all, of the Aelvs and rendering Aelvia into a wasteland.
Left without a homeland, the Aelvians adapted with an almost admirable resiliency and returned to seize control of the island continent of Iendenali from their non-magic using cousins. In the ensuing centuries the baseline humans had reverted to a pastoral way of life, with no more than the usual petty altercations, and a tech level concerned mainly with raising crops. They were helpless as babes in against Aelvian magic, which had become even more powerful now that they weren't fighting an organized AI to create effects. The baseline neohumans were conquered and enslaved after a brief but bloody war.
The Aelvians by this time had specialized in 'life sculpting', magic concerned with shaping living organisms. Iendenali was reworked into an Edenic paradise - for the Aelvians, of course. The baseline neohumans were altered for different functions, much in the way we created different breeds of dogs and other domestic animals. Iendenalian society stagnated in this state of stasis for centuries. The Aelvians had systematically destroyed any evidence of the previous human society, and the docile neohumans were genetically incapable of defying their masters, the only bits of their culture passed on as fairy tales told to children.
A peculiarity of Aelvians was that they no longer reproduced naturally. In fact, they had worked so many alterations on their own form they were probably incapable of it. New Aelvs were produced mainly to flatter one's ego. As individuals were nearly immortal, young Aelvs were permanently stuck at the bottom of the social ladder, awaiting the rare occasion that one of their elders actually died. A few released their frustration by exploration, and one of these expeditions discovered an entirely new continent across the ocean: Caranoctia.
A small contingent of Aelvians relocated to the new continent, overseeing large numbers of human colonists (who did the actual work). Immediately they ran into difficulties.
Caranoctia was already the home of intelligent descendants of the chimeras: centaurs, satyrs, and frost giants. Aughwar from Xbalanque (South America) were aggressively colonizing Caranoctia from the western coast. The delighted Aelvian life sculptors saw these people as fascinating new material for their art, an attitude which did not endear them to the autochthones. What's worse, their refined breeds of humans died off in droves, felled by disease, animal attacks, and preventable accidents. The neohumans were constitutionally too weak and mentally too inflexible and dependant to survive the rigors of the Caranoctian wilderness. The Aelvians tried a variety of methods such as hybridizing humans with tough native animals (see: trolls) and even themselves, but what eventually prevailed was a 'mongrel' mishmash of breeds very close to the basal human both physically and mentally. The spark of independence was rekindled in the mongrels. No longer were they content to be docile slaves, and on Caranoctian soil Aelvs lacked the advantages of firepower and numbers.
After two hundred years of colonization effort, ships mysteriously stopped coming from Iendenali, those sent to investigate never returned, and communications fell silent. Obviously some large-scale disaster had occurred, but no one knew quite what. The few Aelvians in charge became paranoid and tightened their hold on the human population. The humans asked themselves why they were letting themselves be pushed around, and found allies with the native intelligent species and rebellious created kinds. War broke out. The humans had technology and numbers on their side, the Aelvians had magic (and some help from aughwar allies).
The war dragged on for decades until a decisive end: the Sundering.
Some say it was a deliberate disaster caused by mad Aelvian magic users, some say it was accidental. Others say it was nature itself (or dragons!) acting to end the war. A gargantuan earthquake literally split the continent in half, widening the slow, gentle Sweetwater (Delildi) river into a raging whitewater channel. Almost half of the human population was killed, countless of the nonhuman allies and antagonists, and all but a handful of Aelvians.
Life goes on. So this is the situation as it stands.
The eastern seaboard, where the colonies began, are controlled by the humans. The humans have been industriously recovering, aided by their ally species, and gradually trying to figure out how to rule themselves. At the moment their lands are divided in seven city-states called Territories, and elected officials govern as a parliament called the Septarchy. They face threats from leftover biological weapons (monsters), enemy species like the aughwar, shady operators species like the trolls, and Aelvian loyalists and splinter cults within their own ranks. The lands of the sylvan satyrs were in the pathway of destruction, and they're displaced persons struggling to make their way in the new world. During the war, valuable metal was mined in the cold northern mountains inhabited by the alpine satyrs, and the great strength of the tundra-dwelling frost giants made them extremely valuable laborers. While some giants still live as hunter-gatherer tribes, a considerable number now live in human cities (not to mention giants are basically human, so there has been a lot of crossbreeding).
On the border between east and west are the Marchlands, the Caranoctian equivalent of the Wild West, lawless and dangerous. It is here where the Aelvian's leftover genetically modified beasts still roam, trashing local ecosystems and making life miserable for the intelligent species who make their homes there. The trolls are making a name for themselves, too. Long before the war, Aelvian life sculptors crossed humans with indigenous creatures to create a tough, intelligent servile race, but the trolls quietly bided their time, then rose up in rebellion, slaughtered their makers in Thorcasia (the life sculptor's mecca), leaving it in ruins, and disappeared into the swamps. Trolls have begun to emerge from hiding. They've slunk back into the ruins of Thorcasia and seem to be dedicating themselves to rebuilding it and relearning the old science.
Across the Delildi river, the west is referred to as "the monsterlands". There are human cities, but many are controlled by loyalists (with a mad puppet Aelvian king installed by the ruling parties), and some are under the thumb of the aughwar. In Caranoctia's equivalent of the Great Plains, the Sea of Grass, humans imitate the worst traits of their old Aelvian rulers and have enslaved centaurs and a resistance leader and prophet has built a secret city in the desert as a home base to organize the centaurs against them. The last few Aelvians, damaged by the hideous backlash of the Sundering's magic, can be found slinking in the back alleys of their once glorious cities, feral and insane. Take the wind wagons further west, and you'll find an island empire of the descendents of half-aelvs on the inland sea where Wyoming and Utah used to be. California fulfilled its most hackneyed prediction and is now a fabulous tropical island. Lord only knows what we'll find there.
Notes:
Why "The Inheritance of Dragons" when dragons play only a brief, albeit pivotal, role? Because as a rule of fantasy novels, dragons on the cover sell books. Eh.
There’s nothing entirely original here, I could point you to a dozen different inspirations. Most directly would be works by Vance, DeCamp and Poul Anderson that mixed technology and fantasy. They actually inspired D&D, too, and Caranoctia started as a D&D campaign world, so it all comes full circle in a way. I like my fantasy worlds to make sense (Lawrence Watt-Evans is great for this) which I reckon is stupid to expect from fantasy, so this is really science fiction in fantasy drag (I'm picturing a robot in a unicorn suit).
So there's the staples of dragons and spell casting, but the dragon bodies are a utility fog, a swarm of cycrobes linked together and acting in concert to create a solid object and spell casting consists of rituals to communicate with the cycrobes, which need to be complex and distinct enough from ordinary actions, speech and circumstances that the programs can't be triggered accidentally. Further info on this particular inspiration at http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0219.html
As for my personal feelings on the idea of a Singularity, a technological leap that would transform us into creatures so powerful and different from our present state as we are from flatworms, well, I don't quite buy it. Our technology may be quite advanced from fire and the wheel, but what do we do with that technology? We use it to more efficiently perform the same basic things that apes do. We keep in contact with our social group, we try to impress potential mates, we amuse ourselves with games and stories that mimic beating up our enemies and threatening monsters, struggling to the top of the pecking order, winning a mate. Despite all the tech that makes it possible, you could go back in time and tell the story of your latest Warcraft exploit to the same audience that sat around a campfire listening to Beowulf. That why my post humans are lazy, arrogant, destructive nerds, because to be otherwise wouldn't be human.
Caranoctia - which is technically the name of the continent, not the world; the world is Earth - itself is rather blatantly based on America. One, because I live here and so am more familiar with its geography and history, and they say write what you know. Also, generic fantasy is typically set in a medieval pseudo-Europe, so I thought it would be fun to instead smush together Civil War, Wild West, and Victorian era stuff. If you look at the tech level, it's more like magical steam punk, although the novel in progress is set mostly in the wilderness. I haven't really gone into the detail of the rest of the world, mainly because none of the characters has gone there yet. Whatever the Aelvs did to Asia has likely left it full of daikaiju. South America will be fun to explore - I've decided that a portion of the mad cycrobe swarm stocked it with prehistoric monsters which owe as much to movies and TV depictions as they do actual science. There's also the possibility that atypically competent posthuman dragons have colonized and therefore the moon and other planets, since their bodies technically don't need food, air or water.