The Small, Wet Country Across the Sea
Jess Gets Really Sentimental for a Brief Moment
This is the Wikia for a bunch of threaded stories set in a medieval-fantasy universe, created by a nerdy gal named Jess with the help of her equally nerdy friends. This is where we keep a bunch of information on the characters in these tales, as well as just about everything there is to know about the lore and setting.
It was originally created as a simple roleplay game on ROBLOX, but spiraled off into something much more meaningful and extraordinary to the roleplayers. Together we spent countless hours having the time of our lives developing the lore and how this universe works, building our games without striving to make them to just be well-built, per-say, but rather building them to be something meaningful and with continuity with the lore.
All of us essentially put our heart and soul into our characters - developing them and getting attached to them, connecting with them, empathizing with them, making these works of fiction something almost tangible. Bonding with our characters as well as each other has been something downright magical. Jess even wrote a compilation of short stories taking place in this fictional world and published it on Kindle, and plans to write more.
And now I can get off my high horse, stop talking in third person like a sanctimonious dingbat, and actually get into the meat of the stuff!
Eltalor's Creation
The very first TSWCAtS roleplay game on ROBLOX - sometimes referred to as "V1" to differentiate between the other four versions of TSWCAtS we have available - was first created on October 11th, 2013. If you don't know what ROBLOX is, I beg you to look it up so you can bear with me through this explanation. If you're feeling a bit lazy, however, ROBLOX is, to summarize, a sandbox game similar to Minecraft in the way that you build from blocks with other players and create practically anything you want.
When I first made TSWCAtS, I just called the game "Roleplay in the Mountains", and it was just a blank, randomly generated terrain map with no buildings. My friend, Mark, was the first person I showed this game to, and he helped me create the game as well as the lore from the very beginning. He is still a co-owner to this day.
We made it into an open server that anyone could join, and even allowed most newcomers to build on the map. A very surprising amount of players joined and built the game with us, and soon enough, the map was full of all sorts of buildings. Houses, docks, caves, towns, LOTS of underground tunnels and secret houses (seriously, there's so many we haven't even fully explored, and the map itself isn't even that big), even an entire grand palace, you name it. So many people contributed to building the game that we hardly remember who built which parts of it anymore.
The map is very mountainous and vast, with many lakes and rivers. There is a large forest that takes up about a quarter of the map (thank god I added trees I mean seriously it was so tacky at first), and a large wizard's tower that is visible no matter which part of the map you're on. There is a small town in the corner of the map, connected to a long bridge. I still have no idea who built it, but we've called it "Anima Town" since, and roleplays most frequently take place in it.
I don't really know just when this happened, but somewhere along the line I decided to rename this game "TSWCAtS" since "Roleplay in the Mountains" was starting to sound dumb and vague (not that "TSWCAtS" is much better, but I digress). TSWCAtS is an abbreviation for "The Small, Wet Country Across the Sea", which is the name of a country in the Septimus Heap book series by Angie Sage. I mean, I was admittedly a huge nerd for the series at that point, but I still don't entirely know why I chose that name since the universe we've created isn't supposed to be that same setting, nor are our roleplays Septimus Heap-esque in the slightest.
Even though it was really just supposed to be a placeholder name, the name "TSWCAtS" grew on us so much that now we're reluctant to change it. Of course I don't refer to the setting as that in my actual stories, but when we're roleplaying we tend to refer to it as TSWCAtS simply because it grew on us. The canon name of the country is actually "Eltalor", and in the roleplays this seems to be synonymous with "TSWCAtS".
Just to give a brief rundown of the lore, the form of government in the country of Eltalor is monarchy, with the eldest child as the heir. The current ruler is a woman named Queen Venus, and her daughter and heir is Princess Terririn. Eltalor has a division of knights guarding the cities and the palace, the captain/leader of them being a young woman named Munne Servil. Eltalor has had a very rough history with the notably corrupt, bigoted country of Ofeilia due to their very different societies and politics. Sorcery is very prevalent in Eltalor and is a part of everyday life, though in Ofeilia it's mostly outlawed (unless you're a rich white guy). Dark magic and necromancy, however, are widely considered taboo in Eltalor and are extremely illegal due to people abusing it greatly in the past, though it isn't actually inherently evil, and the Tigress seem to be particularly good with it.