Every long-term project has an odd little origin story.
Panimálay’s just happens to involve Vikings giving Greek hoplites the side-eye across a homemade map.
About ten years ago, I wanted a setting where history’s great armies could meet without worrying about timelines or empires collapsing 800 years too early. A neutral world, crossbows as the high-water mark of technology, where the old tactical questions could finally be played out properly:
Could a Norman knight break a Roman line?
Could a phalanx hold a beach against raiders?
What happens when you give everyone the same terrain and tell them to get on with it?
So Panimálay began as a battlefield disguised as a planet.
The Maths-First Era
Those early days were anything but romantic. The world was built on arithmetic and stubbornness:
-
Population densities calculated to determine troop levies
-
Resource maps dictating which regions could sustain which armies
-
Weekly supply limits setting the boundaries of every possible campaign
-
Settlements placed only where the land, climate, and resources justified them
-
Every army existing because the numbers said it could
It wasn’t story-driven. It wasn’t even character-driven.
It was logistical worldbuilding — the sort of planet a military quartermaster would design.
And it worked.
But it didn’t stay that way.
When the World Started Growing Its Own Roots
(Or: the moment the spreadsheets staged a coup)
At some point — and I genuinely couldn’t pinpoint when — the world started changing on me.
I’d sit down to tweak a coastline or tidy up a supply line and end up wondering who actually lived there and why they bothered putting up with the weather. The armies were still marching around the edges of the map, but they had somehow stopped being the main event.
Cultures began… appearing.
Not because I’d meticulously planned them, but because they apparently had things to say.
A mountain range I’d drawn purely because it made a tidy defensive barrier suddenly wanted a creation myth. A stretch of farmland meant only to feed legionaries began whispering about seasonal festivals and odd little regional customs. Trade routes I drew purely for grain logistics started insisting on having stories and grudges and local politics attached.
And the spreadsheets — the cold, logical, joyless spreadsheets — turned into seeds.
I’d open a population table expecting numbers and instead find myself thinking about what those people might sing, or believe, or grumble about when winter overstayed its welcome.
It was as if the world tapped me on the shoulder and said,
“Alright, nice battlefields mate — but can we get on with being alive now?”
The Shift, and the Arrival of Edrion
Then AI came along. Not to replace anything — I already had the bones of the world — but to help turn all these fragments and half-formed cultures into something coherent.
The rough maps became proper coastlines.
The isolated notes became interconnected histories.
The tactical framework became a living place.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, Edrion emerged. Not a warlord. Not a commander. Just a wanderer. A chronicler. Someone who looks at the world the way I’ve been trying to for years. He became the voice of Panimálay — not its ruler, but its witness.
The Atlas Phase
The more things developed, the clearer it became that the world deserved an atlas — a proper one. A full companion of maps, climates, myths, languages, trade patterns, cultural notes, strange traditions, arguments, and all the other oddities that turn a map into a place.
What began as a tactical sandbox has become a layered, evolving world with its own identity.
Ten Years On
The tactical logic is still there, buried in the foundation.
But it’s no longer the point.
The world has grown past its origins. It has people now, cultures, beliefs, contradictions — and a narrative thread running through it in Edrion’s voice.
Still Growing
The world I began with is still here, but something new has grown over it — more intricate, more human, more demanding. Every time I return to Panimálay, it hands me some new thread I didn’t expect.
A new origin for a mountain range.
A festival that suddenly explains a cultural quirk.
A coastline that quietly refuses to stay the shape I drew last year.
I doubt that process will ever truly stop. Worlds like this never stay still, and I hope you will join me in the new year to further develop Panimálay.
Add comment
Comments