BlitzTurner
patreon
The Yggsmir - An Introduction
🕑 Added 2025-01-06 23:32:44 +0000 UTCI tried to think of the best way to convey the things I know about this project to you all and started realising I didn’t know where to begin… probably because I’m so close to it and I already know so much about this.
So, I approached a friend I trust but who also didn’t know anything more that the rest of you about this, and got them to send me a few interview-style questions they’d like to know about, and that’s how I’m going to explain things.
1. What's The Yggsmir about? How would you describe it?
The Yggsmir is a reimagining and sequel to certain mythologies combined with the ideas, memories and stories that have been special to me. My vision for The Yggsmir is that I will spend the rest of my life working on a collection of short stories, novels, graphic novels, comics, and anything else I feel like working on, and all of it will take place in The Yggsmir.
From now on, every original character I make, every story I tell, every piece of art that I draw for myself takes place somewhere on that tree.
I have many projects in my files that have gone unfinished and for the longest time, I thought that I was incapable of finishing any - that maybe it was a defect that I had that I just wasn't strong enough to do it. But I see now, while working on The Yggsmir, that every project I've worked on has led me to this point. Every project I have worked on has ended up somewhere on the tree… but I will get to that in another question.
The Yggsmir itself is a colossal tree, traveling through space at a fantastic speed, roughly the size of a small solar system.
The Yggsmir is protected by a colossal serpent; A life form, the size of which few have imagined. The tree is powered, sustained and propelled through powerful magics and a captive sun. The light of this sun keeps everything on The Yggsmir alive in the vast, cold, empty, starless void between galaxies that it’s currently traveling through.
Originally, nine planets were brought on this journey and eight remain.
We have the Leaf Worlds of Asgard, Vanagard, and Alfgard. The homes of gods, monsters, rulers and sorcerers, they control the tree and everything that happens within it.
The Leaf Worlds take advantage of the protection from the branches and leaves of the tree, as well as the light of the fruit, making these worlds lush and vibrant utopias.
Around the trunk of the tree (where the sun is held) we have the Dwarven home world of Svartlegard, where they specialise in blacksmithing, runes and various types of magical forging (that I do not want to spoil here).
There is also Midgard, the ancestral home of the Allfather and the source of all humanity. (Supposedly, according to the peoples of the tree). The world of Midgard is very much like 1990s earth, if it work completely inhabited by the Norse.
Circling the Core Worlds is the Jotungard asteroid belt.
Heading down into the darkest worlds (the Root Worlds), we have the unwanted but sadly necessary (for theological reasons) desolate worlds of Muspelgard, Niflgard and Bolvgard.
Muspelgard is a shattered planet with unusual magnetic and gravitational forces at play, causing many islands and continents to float in the sky.
A home of spell slinging cowboys and swash-buckling sky pirates, the apocalyptic world of Niflgard could best be described as a zombie apocalypse happening during an ice age.
The world of Bulgard is [REDACTED].
I have many stories to tell on The Yggsmir. I have a set of prequel stories telling the origin of the tree, the races and the people on it. I have several stories that are set on the same world.
So, even though Svartlegard might be devoted to the Dwarves, I have not yet decided if I will be devoting it to their rune forging, magical abilities or their ability to craft fantastical weapons (like the legendary Mjolnir).
Or will it be my teleporting rogues? Or a magical card game based on the rune system?
These are all potentials that I am working on at present and each of those ideas uses the same world and different characters and goes down different story paths.
I want The Yggsmir to be something I am always building on.
I'll be honest - I don't know if I have what it takes.
I don't know if I'm a good enough writer, artist, promoter…
I don't know if I have the time, the energy or the skill, but I know that I want to create worlds that people want to play with. Worlds they want to visit. Worlds they want to write their own stories in.
I want to keep creating this and keep getting better and better at writing short stories set on the tree until I become confident enough to start writing the novels. Then, once I have written one or two, and I'm confident that I can write my best stuff, I will begin with the main novels that will make up the bulk of the story.
I plan to be working on this until I die and, as a result of this, I’ve been making some personal changes.
I have lost 120 pounds and counting, I am going to the gym to build muscle and I am doing everything in my power to live as long as possible, so that I can do as much of this as I can.
Should this be in any way successful, I am tasking my husband with finding someone to carry on this project after I am gone with all the notes that I have ever taken.
More than that, I want The Yggsmir to be a place where people feel confident that they can create fan art and fan fiction without fear of reprisals.
My work is my work, your work is your work.
The only thing I ask is that you don't try to make money off my work with your work. What I mean by that is I want to make a place where every minority, where every trans kid, where every child who feels left out has somewhere magical that they can visit and be themselves and see themselves represented without fear… but it's more than that too.
I want to create a tree and a world that redefines certain aspects of our society that I do not enjoy. I want to perhaps show a different way of doing things and then contrast that on a different world, and then maybe contrast that again . Maybe there are no right options - Maybe there are many. But what I do know is that I want everyone to be able to imagine themselves here.
Can you imagine being on the forest worlds of Vanagard, looking up into the night sky, and instead of seeing the stars, seeing a mass of moving colossal branches, beautiful golden leaves the size of continents and large, planet sized fruit, emitting powerful magical light illuminating the sky, as the branches fade in and out of the atmospheric view.
Or imagine the same thing from the icy world of Niflgard, where the roots practically block out all light so that there is only a sliver of sunlight every day, and yet the Allfather magically sustains life here.
Contemplate the world's serpent, a creature that has grown so large over the centuries that it encircles this solar system-sized tree, drifting into view from the planet surface as it returns to the tree to eat some fruit. Imagine the devastation of the gravity swell, the worlds shifting as this behemoth goes about its yearly feed.
But maybe I shouldn't have sold you that…
That'll just be our secret.
It's hard for me to know how much to tell you, how much to show you, how much to try and trick you with!! 😏
2. Who are the major characters and races aboard the Yggsmir? Who brought them all together?
This is an interesting question because the answer to it is integral to the story of the tree.
There are thousands of years of history and millennia of cosmology at play to answer that question.
What I can say is The Yggsmir was created and the planets were assembled by a powerful creature known as an Allsoul. This particular Allsoul is known on the tree as the Allfather, though he is known by other names elsewhere.
There are several races on the tree, including Humans, Dwarves, Jotnar… all of this, of course, is subject to change, even my own naming systems. I do have a significant number of races already, but that’s easy when you're working with both mythology and your own internal cosmology.
I would say that, so far, my favourite race that I’m working on are my version of the Jotnar, who you would know as Loki’s people from Norse mythology.
What I find the most fascinating about the Jotnmar… Oh, I really can tell you any of that!! 😅
As for major characters, that I can tell you.
When I begin the first major novel, the main character is called Krullervo, from the world of Midgard, who will get pulled into a cosmic fight between the Allfather and an extremely powerful, mysterious entity that has been attacking the tree relentlessly for thousands of years. For now, you may refer to this entity as, “The Dragon”. (It is not a dragon. 😉)
3. How would you describe the magic system of your world? Does it differ for the different races?
This is another excellent question. There are again a lot of secrets, twists and turns when it comes to my magic and science systems for the tree.
I will say that each of the nine worlds that are currently on the tree, and possibly some that may or may not be, have at least one magic system attached to them.
There is a very good reason for this, but I can't go into it here - that is to be revealed.
I'd like to give examples, but my magic systems are interconnected, interdependent and part of the core mystery. I will be exploring each of them individually at great length and how each magic type might be used differently by different peoples on different planets.
4. What were your major influences in creating this project?
In November 2024, my heart broke. I won't go into why.
I had been working on this project for a long time, but was too afraid to move forward because I didn't want another failed project. But after November, I felt I needed to replace a part of my past that now felt tainted, wrong and alien to me. A magical place that I used to truly cherish and brought me a lot of happiness, that now I can't think of without feeling a queasy, unsettling feeling and I suddenly realised that that world is gone for a lot of other people who aren't as lucky as I am.
So, I decided to take every project that I've ever done, take the best bits of all of them, the best characters of all of them, combine them with my love of various mythologies, remix it all into something new and use it as a vehicle to create worlds I hope children who were children like I was have somewhere safe and diverse to imagine themselves doing impossible things and then I took it a step further.
I thought of every other franchise story, computer game that had ever been cancelled, ruined, taken offline, spoiled by corporate greed or various agendas and I wanted to save them too.
So I will also be reimagining some of my favourite things that mean a lot to me from those.
For my own personal projects, it's been so nice to save various characters and ideas that I've had and I can't wait to start redrawing them for this new world that they're all now going to have a home in, in one capacity or another.
5. What has been your favourite part of coming up with this world?
See, that's interesting because even at this extremely early stage, I already know that my two favourite parts of this are the prequel series and the spinoff series that is not set on the tree - in fact there are two of them. I can’t speak about one, but I will talk very briefly about the other.
The Yggsmir did not start as I have currently described it. In fact, it started out as a very simple story of Vampires based on earth. To watch a story about vampires on earth and their history and lore evolve to such a point that it became The Yggsmir, and that those Vampires are not only still canonical, but an integral part of the lore of the tree, is just absolutely fascinating to me, and I can't wait until I am able to tell stories set on earth itself, because some of the Vampires and Dhampyr here are truly horror shows!!
Which is an excellent way for me to say that while I work on the tree, I do intend to explore various genres and themes that some people may like and some may not.
I hope people can just pick and choose what they enjoy, like fruit off a tree.
6. What has been the biggest challenge in creating this world?
Trying to walk the line between being respectful to the mythologies that inspire me and being able to tell the stories with substance that I want to tell has been a bit of a challenge.
I have, for the most part, been absolutely delighted with how, for example, most Norse mythology as it currently understood could fit perfectly into my world.
And yet, I’m trying to show you the stuff that maybe was happening behind the scenes that you missed, or things that were misinterpreted or reinterpreted. I'm not so much offering a reinterpretation as much as a fun alternative. 😄
I wanted The Yggsmir to feel somewhat rooted in the real world, but I wanted to take it far, far away from any problems this real world of ours has and do so in a time period that predates a lot of the origins of those problems.
Other than that, coming up with my magic system required me to come up with what I refer to as my cosmic elements. Each of my magic systems is connected to a particular planet, but it’s also connected to a particular Allsoul and a particular cosmic element. Finding the right elements that fit those requirements and worked for those planets, and also represented the right Allsoul nearly turned my brain to mush!! (I was very crabby that month!! 😅)
7. What do you hope readers will take away from reading your work?
I hope to create a place where people who have nowhere else to go can come and find somewhere here that they connect with and can imagine themselves being. I want them to be able to imagine themselves in these fantastical places with these incredible sky boxes, where outrageous things can, and do, happen and that everyone is welcome here.
But I also want to use these fantastical events as windows in which I can maybe impart some wisdom that I've picked up from all the horrible things that have happened to me in my life.
While I’m not looking for pity, I’m also aware that I have suffered a little bit more than most and I believe I can use that to tell some incredible stories.
I believe I can use things that people have done to me that sound so outrageous when I say them aloud and wrap it up with a magical bow to help people understand some pretty hard-to-digest content in the most fun way possible.
But, even if this isn't successful for a financial standpoint, if even one person sees one part of this tree and their life is made slightly better because of it, then I succeeded doing what I want to do… and I know that sounds corny, but I want to create something that’s as important to others as some franchises were for me growing up.
8. How do the science based races and the magic based races interact, is there hostility or understanding between them? Does science have any weird effects on magic, and vice versa?
Sadly, I am unable to answer this question at this time.
It is a very good question, but the nature of science on the tree, its interaction with magic, and both of their interaction with races is a large part of several plots.
What I can say is that on worlds so charged with magic, technology has a habit of evolving differently than it has before and sometimes that can work in two directions, but if you really want to know about science on the tree, you would have to travel to the world of Bolvgard where [REDACTED].
So, with the exception of this week, as it’s my birthday week and so close to Christmas, I will be working on The Yggsmir every Monday and Tuesday for the rest of my life (give or take).
I will produce notes and artwork for the Patreon each month.
I will make special efforts to make sure that one of the races or characters from the tree is drawn in the usual erotic style for everyone here to enjoy. 😉
This project means a lot to me and there is a lot about it that I know already, but not everything is finalised, not every story has been written down - in fact, no stories have yet. I do not have the outlines of every story.
What I do have is the blueprint for it all and I'm going to be working towards crafting a (hopefully) very compelling universe over the years, but this is not something that will happen overnight.
I am only one person, and this is a huge undertaking.
I am not a prolific writer, and I do have a husband, somewhat of a social life and a job.
I can promise I will always do my best, but it will take some time before I feel confident that I can start the main novels, so we will most likely be beginning with world building, concept art, working on the character designs (of which there will be sexy versions of course) and then we will move on to the short stories.
These short stories are how I will be training myself to become a better writer.
I will be telling fun stories set on the tree that highlight different worlds, different races, different magics. However, all of these can be seen as additional.
They will provide a greater view of what's going on, but aren't essential to anything I'm doing. Interconnected, standalone stories… as ridiculous as that sounds.
If you bear with me, and if I have what it takes to pull this off, I think this could be really special.
And if not, there's a lot of new smutty OCs about to be flooding this Patreon!! All that fanart AND OCs? Who could complain…
Except Susan. SUSAN!!!! Shakes Fist
Thank you for coming to this Ted Talk.
Seriously though, I hope this has answered some questions and I hope you’re all as excited as I am to come on this journey with me - I definitely couldn’t pick a better community to take along for the ride!!
Blitz xoxo
Comments
Blitz
Thanks so much Aikuchi-san!! I’m super hyped about it, so I really hope people like what comes from it. 🥰
Blitz
That’s incredibly sweet Conor - thanks SO much!! 🥰 And thanks for the support - it means a lot to me, especially on this project!! ❤️
Conor Young
It makes me so happy to see you so inspired, Blitz, this project really sounds like something special to you. I'm so looking forward to hearing and seeing more of these worlds, the little teasers you've given us are so cool! So proud of you for the steps you've been taking towards your artisitc and personal fulfillment, onwards and upwards for 2025 ❤️❤️❤️
Aikuchi-san
Much hugs! :D This sounds like an awesome introduction to a mytho-fantastic world building of an RPG as well!
