This is presented as a blog to account my creation and ideas in forming The Realm.
I have always wanted to tell a large story with many parts involved in it like life itself. You are where you are now in your life because of many circumstances and people in your life, I find that fascinating and try to make my stories follow suit. I had previously written a couple of large stories, most notably the "My Sisters Saga" which I presented in the medium of manga. That was a multi-generational mystery centered on the Toho family and a goddess. The story was simple enough but the nuts and bolts of how it all got to that place are what made it interesting to me. I was able to layer history onto the current characters and then later reveal those points and even tell back stories of the ancestors of the Toho Family. By the end of the massive story you could go back and see how our protagonists ended up where they were and why they did the things they did. You can read the whole story here
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Moving forward; I wanted to try the same thing but on film. A web-series seemed liked the logical idea as I could take time and flesh out characters and even make short films to fill in historical gaps so that one day you could watch all of the material and get a richer story out the main, simple story.
Sometime in 2006, I had a germ of an idea about a guy who is left a package by his estranged father and this would lead him to a forgotten land that had since died. As he learned about the people who lived there, he grew to understand his father. This would be called "The Compass" but it did not develop any further than an idea.
The concept of an undiscovered country intrigued me. Holding onto that idea, I added the concept of possible modern day witches. Descended of witches who lived in a dimension just next to ours and a queen that had to banish her daughter to protect her from the darkness that threatened both worlds. Appropriately I named the series "Woven", since I would weave the lives of the exiled witch with that of a mortal human. The concept got really big and I feared I could not do it justice in a web series and that was abandoned.
The in the summer of 2013 a more simple idea came to me and ran it past my wife Allyson. She liked the cells of ideas, well, more like… broad brush strokes and she eventually filled in the gaps and characters and "The Realm" was born. Some of the ideas for the characters from the prior endeavors filtered down and eventually became Sorcha, James, Melvina, and Maedoc
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Another concept that help fuels ‘The Realm’ was embracing my love of Anime and Dungeons and Dragons. In Anime, always plays out large stories that are nothing like the stories we tell here in America. The imagination and scope of the ideas are so high concept and beautiful. This helped my create the main story and plot as well as shape certain characters like 5 Ash 2 (or Ashley if you like).
As far as the history and such that is where Dungeons and Dragons came into play. About three years ago a friend of mine asked if she could try a game that most boys, when she was growing up, said that it was “not a game for girls”! I said absolutely. I had not played the game in almost two decades so I was excited. As we played I created a large story for the world we would be playing in and even created a 50,000 plus year history of this planet. The land was called Ironcrest and would eventually become the land Sorcha, Melvina and Kyan came from. I wove the history of Ironcrest into the backstory of The Realm and the rest was….history.
So now with season one under our belt and some short films coming to fill in the gaps, we are ready to do season two and the film to finish of our long story. I hope you will be able to embrace it. When the time comes, watch all of the varied material. See the nooks and crannies hidden between the everyday dialogue of these characters and see the lives they are living because of the actions of their ancestors and the results those actions made.
