🔭 Overview

Heirbrosse is a fantasy world with several stories, characters, and timelines already built ‘n’ ready to go. But there is room for so much more. This worldbuilding project aims to combine both decentralized and centralized systems to help inspire, teach, delight and reward both readers and writers.
 

👁️ Vision

On one end of the spectrum: an open-ended, “open-source” and royalty-free repository of story ideas, prompts and inspiration. Anyone can access and play with characters, settings, magic systems—use it for RPGs, your own stories, etc.

On the other end: a robust canonization system for novels, short stories and other media that’s officially associated with the main storylines and major characters of the world. NFT projects, collectables, core contributors, and all that fun stuff that comes with the ‘creator economy’ in web3.

Additionally, this project will aim to bring utility to Hive’s SCHOLAR and SCRIBE creative writing tokens.
 

🗺️ Plan for how it works (v1)

This Hive Community will primarily host information about the world (e.g. maps, character sheets) and metainformation about the worldbuilding project (like contests, or this “intro” post you're reading right now).

All fiction output will ideally be posted in the Scholar & Scribe creative writing community here on Hive, though if it gets posted in this community no one will be fed to any dragons.

A Discord server will eventually be spun up to:

• facilitate real-time collaboration,
• act as an onboarding platform for non-Hive users,
• NFT-gate special content or channels for supporters

 
NFTs relating to the canonized Heirbrosse world will be developed, likely outside of Hive to start. These will be a bridge to other chains and users, hopefully drawing them in towards the nexuses of either Hive or Discord (if they’re sufficiently wooed by the magic of the realm). These NFTs have no real limit on what they can be, but some low hanging fruit ideas are:

• 📚 NFT Books of finished canonized or “legend” stories
• 🔖 NFT Bookmarks (see example project here)
• 🔮 Magic items from Heirbrosse
• 👤 Collectable character cards or pfps
• 🌆 Land, map, or city cards representing a virtual stake in the world

✅ Canonization “system” (v1)

Any and all creators will be encouraged to ‘steal’ whatever material they want to fuel their own ideas, stories, games, RPGs, whatever. There will be contests, prompts, anthology curation, etc. Heirbrosse will be built in public, so there’s no sense in trying to control what can and can’t be used.

However, good worldbuilding requires internal consistency, proper timeline management, enticing character arcs, meta-arcs, and some sense of logical flow between stories.

Hence, a highly centralized council-of-one shall oversee canonization: that’s me (@jfuji)! The idea isn’t so much to rule over canon with an iron fist—rather, I’d like to build a circle of trusted advisors and even enable DAO-like voting to aid in canonization choices. Even an editing pathway to take stories from good-but-uncanonizable to great-and-canon! Also, if skilled and passionate creators emerge that wish to steer certain arcs, they may be trusted with canonization too.

But veto power needs to exist to stop ‘Boaty McBoatface’ style brigading—good fun as it all is, I do take the worldbuilding business seriously 🤓
 

Farming canon is not the point though

Having something canonized is like a badge of honour. It’s a good thing, but it’s not the main goal of the project.

Non-canon material can still be celebrated, enjoyed and deployed as NFTs or other consumable digital goods—it’s effectively fanfic that couldn’t be officially incorporated for some reason or another.

No, the main point for me is to let this world out into the open and let it breathe. Let it discover new creators and ideas and open up paths and worlds for others.

And if no one wants to join in, and I sit here toiling on the world and its elements all by myself—that’s AOK: I’ve been doing it for decades already and it’s given birth to a number of novels. So anything beyond that feels like a bonus to me!

✒️ SCHOLAR and SCRIBE utility

The initial plan is pretty simple.

Any contests or interactive elements of this worldbuilding project will give preferential treatment to users who have staked SCHOLAR and/or SCRIBE tokens. Much of this figuring and bias will be done manually to start with, though as the tech stack around S&S grows, hopefully so too will the options around what’s possible and scalable.

Being able to offer NFTs or other elements in exchange for SCHOLAR is another milestone to look forward to.
 

What’s next?

 
A few things in the short term that I plan to roll out include:

1. Digging through my personal wiki files of worldbuilding notes and turning them into posts in this community
2. Running a super simple contest where people help name regions on the main Heirbrosse map (teaser above). NFTs and Hive tokens as prizes, and a big bias towards SCHOLAR and SCRIBE stakers
3. Likely tweaking and editing this whole “intro” piece to sharpen details, incorporate feedback, etc.
    

Existing content in the Heirbrosse world

• Canon: The Mountain Dancer is a YA novel published for free on Wattpad.
• Canon: The Childseeker’s War is a full length novel currently being serialized on Hive.
• Sorta non-canon: The Delta of a Thousand Teeth is a series of RP notes, stories, and timelines from a Westmarches style DnD 5e campaign. The non-canon piece is the use of 5e stuff. But many of the maps, lore and timeline elements I do consider canon.
   
  

About the Scholar and Scribe Community

Scholar and Scribe is a creative writing community founded in the forges of Hive's passionate Pizza Guild. It sets itself part from some of the other writing groups on Hive with its unique dual-token system.

[ Quick token guide • S+S 'Whitepaper' ]

Thank you for reading. I own the license to all images in this post, except for the Scholar and Scribe banner icons, which were designed by @trashyomen. Maps designed with the incredible Wonderdraft software.