Irenthar: City of Hate
The world of Tharassian is my longest-running creative project, spanning well over half my life at this point. Originally birthed as a fantasy novel currently on its third rewrite, it has branched out into a multimedia project spanning video game projects, several D&D campaigns, and — most importantly — a massive Hearts of Iron IV mod that is the bedrock of my programming and game design skillset.
A Love Letter to Fantasy
Coming from a family of massive fantasy nerds, it is unsurprising that I would fall in love with the genre from a very young age. One of my fondest childhood memories is my father sitting me down at the kitchen table at around the age of seven for a (simplified) game of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, which my entire family on my dad’s side also plays every year when we gather together to celebrate Christmas and New Years’ Eve. Hells, I learnt English by having those AD&D books on one side and an English-Dutch dictionary on the other, and just reading the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manuals cover to cover repeatedly! Between that, the regular trips to fantasy fairs, the occasional Lord of the Rings marathon and devouring practically every fantasy novel I could get my hands on, wondrous tales of magic, elves and dragons have occupied my mind for most of my life.
Very quickly, merely experiencing the stories of others was no longer enough. I’ve always had my own tales to weave, and Tharassian is my biggest project in that vein to date. Drawing primarily from my deep and abiding passion for the world of Warhammer Fantasy and the homebrew tales my family would spin at the tabletop, with secondary influences from works such as Thief, the Mistborn series, and Anbennar, the worldbuilding of Tharassian centers on grand political narratives built on top of a deep historical context. As a fanatic lover of geopolitics with a Master’s degree in International Relations & Diplomacy, I have greatly enjoyed thinking through the implications of grand-scale actions in the world: what could drive the Elves of Ordoria to their supremacist fanaticism? Why is the Ageless Queen reviled, even if necromancy isn’t inherently a force of objective evil? Why are the Kurgur Orcs organized into roving warbands of wolf-riding raiders, if their homeland is perhaps the pinnacle of intellectual refinement in the entire world? Each of theses questions have intricate answers, informed by the histories of the peoples involved, and the institutions they have built.
At its core, though, Tharassian is simply a love letter to the vaguely faux-European medieval fantasy that has defined most of my childhood. The design goal when I started to build this world was explicitly to build a ‘generic’ fantasy setting — the Dwarves dig greedily and deep, the Orcs raid the lands of the more settled species, and the Elves have lived in their forests for millenia — and to then make it interesting through letting these bland archetypes grow and develop throughout their history, interacting with each other and producing new, unique cultures, stories and conflicts through that civilizational arc.
First, as a Story
The first iterations of Tharassian came in one of the most accessible mediums of artistic creativity: writing! I’ve been writing from a fairly young age, with some of my earliest published work — dating from 2012 — still being available online today (though, please don’t go digging up my old FanFiction.net account…)
In that same year, I would begin working on the fantasy story I’d had vague ideas for in my head for a good while by that point, and Irenthar: City of Hate would begin to take shape! The first draft of the story was about 10,000 words long and, well… written by a thirteen-year old, so it wasn’t exactly Shakespearean prose, but hey — it was a finished story!
From there, Irenthar languished in the recesses of the family computer, gathering digital dust. It wasn’t until a family holiday to Austria where the urge to rewrite it came over me, four years later. I wrote 10,000 words in the span of four days on the battered old laptop we’d brought with — the length of the entire first draft, now only covering the prologue and the first chapter. I’ve chipped away at it over the years, writing off and on when the mood takes me. Currently, the work is just under half-finished, sitting pretty at about 46,000 words. I fully intend to finish it, one day, and have recently completely rewritten the prologue, which is currently publicly available on my AO3!
Why City of Hate? It was revealed unto me in a dream. No, seriously, we were on vacation in Germany and I woke up with the subtitles City of Hate, Tower of Hope, and Temple of Despair burnt into my brain. I knew I had to use them for something, and that something became Irenthar! Look forward to a trilogy eventually, I suppose — can’t let those other two titles go to waste!
Incidentally, this is also where my journey into cartography began — the first drafts of the continents of Tharassian, wildly different from the map you can see at the top of the page, were drawn in fineliner on paper! To this day, I have a habit of sketching random world maps if I’m doodling in the margins of my notebook.
Now, in a Video Game
Then, on the Tabletop
Link to Dreg’s OST!!