Inspiration for the Kane Dragonblood stories

So I got an e-mail from someone who has enjoyed my brother's stories on the adventures of Kane Dragonblood (they are posted over at Legends of the Spiral). And, that same person pointed out that several of the worlds in those stories do not exist in the game of Wizard101.

Yes, that is correct, thus why it is called Fan Fiction.

To help illuminate the fact, I have raided my brother's laptop for a file of pictures he collected that gave him inspiration for those worlds. First up is the fictional Wizard101 world of Carmen Montantum (which is Latin for "Mountain Song").

Now, me and my brother have lived in the Rockies on the family ranch all of our lives until recently, and there are two beautiful valleys on our family ranch, but they are pure wilderness with no lakes or rivers. My brother said that he actually was thinking of pictures of Switzerland when he was first imagining Carmen Montantum, more specifically images from the movie, Sound of Music, but more rustic with the buildings and architecture. The images above were very much so, combined with what he knew of our home, inspirational for how he imagined Carmen Montantum.

Then there is Mirage. Now that world is actually mentioned in the game, Wizard101. In Wysteria, there is a rabbit/humanoid NPC character who mentions that they are from Mirage. Well, considering that our family once took a vacation to Morocco and the Sahara Desert, he had a lot of first hand inspiration to draw upon, both for vast sand dune deserts, and Oasis, and how agriculture is done in those Oasis. He also drew upon his experience with homes and clothing from that vacation for his story, except he made one mistake. In his story, he has the central corridor of a home running as a straight shot from the front door to the walled inner courtyard... in reality, homes in Morocco don't have that kind of straight-shot corridor, but he tweaked it to kind of represent a rabbit's warren.

Then there is Kane's homeworld of Stone. Not too far from where we live, over in southern Utah, there is a vast and dangerous wilderness of desert where people can get lost forever. Me and my brother used to love getting away to this place and go hiking and running for miles and miles. We would just run all over the place like free spirits, exploring sandstone canyons and climbing the buttes -- it was like this vast and dangerous desert was our playground. We always had so much fun everytime we went, and my brother used our experiences to craft the world of Stone. Here are some pics that are similar to what we know, and what he envisioned for Stone:

Then, he imagined the village of Outcrop to be a cliff dwelling village, kind of a cross between Petra in Jordan, and the cliff dwellings of the American southwest, but with multiple vertical levels in a much, much taller cliff than you usually find cliff dwellings and Petra.

And then there is Antelope Canyon, which directly inspired the Spiral Door room for the world of Stone, and the canyon just outside the Spiral Door chamber:

Perhaps the most original world my brother created for his stories was Arboreal. He had no images, but he imagined grey granite mountains (actually like the rockies) surrounded a rich and lush jungle forest that covered a vast valley like a deep carpet. The city of Arboreal he imagined a vertical city carved into terraces in the face of a mountain, with numerous towering waterfalls to either side plunging from the upper reaches of the mountain. If you read the story, you can see that my brother got into some good details.

Then there is the world of Steppe. This one is easy: he had like one picture of Ireland, but he imagined taller grass like the plains of the U.S., and voila, the world of Steppe, which features kind of prominently in the first and third parts of the Kane adventures:

For the worlds of Dragon's Roost, my brother combined images of Dragonspyre, and the houses for that world, with landscape images he saw from an episode of Farscape, "Taking the Stone", which featured a barren and gray world that was still and lifeless and perpetually clouded over in grey clouds. For Maelstrom, in the game of Wizard101, you can buy a house for the school of storm. If you get that house, and stand near the lighthouse looking out to sea... that same image is what inspired my brother for Maelstrom, but with much more violent seas, and he surrounded them with the black lava cliffs of Jeju-do, only much much taller:

And yes, we were there at these cliffs, but during a typhoon. It was spectacular and powerful to see these 50-foot high waves come smashing into these cliffs and send sprays of seawater a hundred feet or more into the air, like an instant skyscraper of water every few seconds. Jeju-do is like the Korean version of Hawai'i, for those who don't know.