Jesse Koepke

When I decided to write a series about a scavenger searching for treasure, I knew the story would need an expansive world. Not just in size, but ethnicities, nationalities, biomes, geographical features, and on and on.

I hoped to emulate features from two of my favorite series:

• The continuous discovery of Harry Potter. Even in the last book he is learning new things about the wizard of world
• The buried history of Lord of the Rings. References in the books and moss-covered ruins in the movies draw you to wonder.

To accomplish the first, the maps are small and limited in The Key of Taculon, the first book in the series. As the characters explore, their understanding of world expands with them.

To accomplish the second, I needed to bury history for them to find. I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration for Egypt—not in architecture, culture, or location, but how pyramids and temples and all sorts of things were buried in sand for 4,000 years. I mean come on! How cool must it have been to dig out things buried for millennia? That’s the feeling I wanted to capture with this series.

Geography

Being from the Rocky Mountains in Montana, geographical features are important for me. The green-blue of pine trees at a distance; the fog that hangs over mountain peaks in the morning; the crisp air of fall and spring—I wanted to set my story predominantly in a place similar to northern United States.

Moving southwest, the land dries out into red rocks and desert similar to Zion National Park. The humid swamps of southern United States lead to the cold east coast waters, progressing further south into the jungles and unexplored reaches like the vast stretches of South America.

These are the places most familiar to me, from where I’ve lived to nations I’ve visited. I wanted to explore what that would look like in a fantasy setting, so that became my main continents to begin the story.

Ethnicities

In all my other fantasy writing, I’ve avoided the typical elves, dwarves, etc. This time I wanted to populate my stories with these, but in new ways.

So this series has three main races:

• Elves
• Dwarves
• Humans

These are iconic characters in fantasy, and with that comes a lot of stereotypes. I wanted my series to feel familiar, yet with a fresh take. So my races are different, both in their personalities and also the power structure in the world. I’ll delve more into that in a later post.

Creating a fantasy world is always a massive undertaking. There are thousands of years of history to discover, and the series will reveal this over time. I’m excited for you to discover it along with the characters!