Writing in Duela

Writing in Duela

This page is for writers. It explains what Duela's rules are, what is fixed, what is open, and how to work inside the shared world without breaking anything other writers depend on.

For an introduction to the world itself, see What is Duela?. For how stories are organized and recognized, see Canon Structure.

The three rules that matter most

If you remember nothing else from this page, remember these.

Belief shapes the world

The Essence responds to belief. When enough intelligent beings hold a clear idea of something, the Essence imprints that idea into reality. This is not a metaphor. It is the mechanism.

A widely believed rumor of a dungeon becomes a dungeon. A title that everyone treats as powerful empowers its holder. A person accused by enough voices of being something they are not will, given time, become it. The Essence does not check whether a belief is true before responding to it. It only responds.

Almost everything strange about Duela descends from this rule. If something seems impossible, ask whether enough belief could make it real. If something seems arbitrary, ask whose belief shaped it.

The System exists, and almost nobody knows

Beneath the surface of the world runs The System: levels, stats, classes, all the quantified machinery of a game. It was installed long ago and operates on everyone. A higher level is meaningfully more capable than a lower one. A class genuinely alters how its holder interacts with the Essence.

The System is real, but it is not visible. The overwhelming majority of people in Duela have no idea it exists. They feel themselves becoming stronger through experience, they notice that certain people seem touched by fate, but they do not see numbers above heads or experience bars filling. The System runs underneath the world like plumbing nobody thinks about.

Gods know, by virtue of what they are. A few mortals know, usually because something extraordinary happened to them. The discovery of the System by ordinary people would change civilization completely, which is part of why most stories take place in a world where it remains hidden.

When you write, you can decide whether your characters know. Most should not. The ones who do should treat the knowledge as dangerous.

There are no neat answers at the top

Duela has gods, many of them, and above them all is the Old God. He established the System and then left. His purposes are unknown. His nature is unknown. Whether he is still aware of Duela is unknown.

This is not a gap waiting to be filled. It is structural. The cosmology does not have a clean explanation at its top, and it is not supposed to.

What is fixed

These are the parts of the world that should not change between stories. They are the spine of the world. If a story contradicts them, it does not feel like Duela. It feels like a different world wearing Duela's name.

The cosmology

The Essence-and-belief mechanism. The existence of The System. The Old God as the unknowable origin point. The three-tier structure of gods (Original, Precursor, New / Ascended), although the boundaries between them are sometimes blurry. Bubble Theory as the framing for what Duela is and what lies beyond it. The Stranger as a source of personal unexplainable events. These are load-bearing.

Major existing nations and figures

Dorado exists, is isolationist, is ruled by King Midas IV, and is built on ferromancy and gold. Ezuna exists, is a shogunate currently ruled by the young Emperor Sumeragi, with Shogun Masayoshi as a major and not entirely trustworthy figure. The Holy Order under Queen Pietra VIII operates across kingdoms in secret, with Dr. Richten Van Helsing as its leading hunter. Hauru lives under her mountain, and her family of ancient vampires endures because she does.

You do not have to use any of these. But if you do, treat them as they are described on the wiki. Do not kill King Midas in a throwaway line. Do not have Hauru reveal herself to the world. These figures are load-bearing for other writers' stories too.

The general state of the world

Roughly fourteenth-century technology, with magic doing the work that industry does elsewhere. Monarchies dominant, with a few republics and trade unions making the royals nervous. One kingdom on the edge of a magical-industrial revolution. Tension everywhere, but full-scale continental war held back by the Essence's response to people's widespread desire to avoid it.

This is the texture of the present moment in Duela. Stories can range across it freely, but the moment itself is shared.

What is open

Most of Duela is open. The wiki describes a handful of nations in detail and gestures at the existence of many more. It names some races, hints at others, and leaves whole categories of the world undeveloped. This is deliberate.

What you can invent freely

• New nations, cities, regions, settlements. The world has plenty of geography that has never been mapped.
• New cultures within existing races. Elves are not monolithic. Orckin vary. Catfolk live in many places. There is room.
• New gods, especially Conceptual Gods or recently Ascended ones. Conceptual godhood is contested and culturally fragmented. There is no single God of War or Goddess of Knowledge, only many regional figures who hold pieces of those domains.
• New monsters, dangers, and creatures. The Piersh is one example of an Essence-touched animal. There can be many more.
• New characters at any level of power, from village healer to near-divine artifact wielder. The world is large enough to contain them.
• New magical traditions, schools, techniques, and lineages within the existing elemental framework, or outside it if a story calls for something stranger.
• Histories, legends, folk beliefs, and rumors that may or may not be true. The Essence rewards belief, so even invented histories can develop a kind of reality over time.

Things flagged as pending

Several entries on the wiki are explicitly undeveloped. Avianfolk, the Clock Elves, the full Ezunian Pantheon, the Mao deity, Lindel, the Karakuri, and others. These are not oversights. They are invitations. A story that develops one of these areas is welcome to. The development belongs to that story; other writers may take the same area in different directions, and that is fine. Multiple incompatible accounts of an undeveloped area can coexist.

What you can softly contradict

Smaller details, such as a minor god's exact temperament, the customs of a single town, or the personality of an unnamed character, can be handled differently by different stories without anyone needing to declare a winner. Duela is large enough that two writers can describe the same place differently and both be telling the truth as their characters experience it.

Larger details should be left alone unless a story has a strong reason. Do not casually rewrite established characters or major nations. Do not retcon the cosmology. If something the wiki establishes is in your way, find a way around it before you find a way through it.

Handling the unexplainable

Sometimes a story needs something the world's normal rules cannot provide. A character with a power that should not exist. A coincidence too perfect to be one. An artifact nobody can account for. A blessing or curse that bends fate.

Duela has built-in places for these. Use them deliberately. The three are distinguished by scale.

If the thing is large and impersonal

Attribute it to the Old God, openly or implicitly. He set up the System. He left imprints whose consequences are still unfolding. Strange foundational things, such as relics from before mortalkind, rules of magic that seem arbitrary, or entire phenomena nobody can trace, can be his doing. He is the cosmology's permission slip for the unaccountable, but only at the foundational scale. Do not use him for a single character's blessing.

If the thing follows from belief or pattern

Route it through The Essence. This is the workhorse of the three. Almost any improbable outcome, such as a character developing a power because they were perceived a certain way, a place becoming dangerous because it was rumored to be, or a person rising to a station because everyone believed they would, can be explained by Essence-imprinting. Use it often, but use it as cause and effect, not as a magic wand. The Essence responds to belief, so show the belief.

If the thing happens to one specific person

Consider the Stranger. He appears in dreams. He grants gifts to mortals for reasons of his own. He runs on impulse, chaos, and personal interest in particular individuals. If a character receives a power, a curse, an item, a piece of foreknowledge, or a sudden change in fortune that targets them and nobody else, the Stranger is the figure who could be behind it. He should be rare. He should be unsettling. He should never be predictable.

Together these three give writers almost any narrative move worth wanting. Use them sparingly enough that they stay strange. A world where the Stranger appears every chapter is no longer strange; it is routine, and that is the opposite of what he is for.

Tone and texture

Duela does not have a single fixed tone. It has been written about with seriousness and with humor, with high drama and with deliberate absurdity. A tragic precursor god weeping for centuries under a mountain and a Shogun who insists on being called the Great Unkillable Demon King are both canon. Both are right.

Some general orientation:

• Duela is a fantasy world that takes its own logic seriously. Even silly elements should obey the cosmology.
• It is not grim by default, but it has room for darkness. The vampire cults, the manipulated history of the Holy Order, the divine wounds carried by some of the Original Gods. These are real and weighty when invoked.
• It rewards specificity. A small detail about how a Catfolk reacts to being compared to a housecat, or how an Orckin pack greets a returning warrior, does more work than a paragraph of generalization.
• It is willing to be funny. Names, traditions, divine personalities, regional customs. There is humor woven through the world, and stories should feel free to find more of it.

If a story is consistent with the cosmology and respects the load-bearing pieces, the tone is the writer's to set.

Scale of stories

Stories in Duela do not need to involve gods, kings, ancient artifacts, or world-ending threats. The world contains beings of enormous power, but most of it is inhabited by people whose stakes are personal, local, and ordinary by Duela's standards.

A village healer dealing with a single Piersh attack is a Duela story. So is a noblewoman navigating a court conspiracy. So is a young apprentice mage learning their first incantation. So is an orphan, a failed knight, a sailor, a criminal, or a wandering monster. The fact that god-tier artifacts exist somewhere on the continent does not mean any given story has to involve them.

A good Duela story should feel like a window into a larger world.

High-power stories

If a story does operate at the high-power end, the existing high-tier figures are themselves in a kind of equilibrium. The reason the continent has not erupted into war is partly the Essence's response to widespread desire for peace, and partly the fact that the major players know what they would be unleashing. Introducing a new figure at the same tier should respect that equilibrium, or have a clear reason to disturb it.

Multiple writers, multiple truths

Two writers can tell stories set in the same town, featuring the same minor character, and arrive at different versions of who that character is. This is not a contradiction. It is how shared worlds work. Each story is true to itself; the larger world is large enough to contain both. Do not feel obligated to harmonize. Do not feel obligated to fork.

The exception is anything fixed (see above). Those should be respected by everyone. Otherwise, write your version, let others write theirs.

Big swings

Duela can absorb big swings. A story about the death of a major god. A story about the unmasking of the System. A story about Hauru leaving her mountain. These are possible to write. The world is robust enough to accommodate them.

The convention is that such stories are read as one possible version of what happens; your story's truth, not necessarily the world's truth. Other writers can continue setting stories in a Duela where Hauru is still under her mountain. The world holds many timelines softly.

If a writer wants a big swing to feel definitive, write it that way and trust readers to recognize the weight. If a writer wants it to be more provisional, leave room. Either is a valid choice.

Branching

A story may branch from another story. A branch credits the story it grows from and does not pretend to replace the original. Branches may continue, reinterpret, contradict, or diverge from their source, and branches may themselves be branched from, indefinitely.

For how branches relate to Living canon and the general collection, see Canon Structure.

Filling gaps

When a writer develops an undeveloped area of the world (writes the first detailed story set in Lindel, fleshes out the Avianfolk, gives the Mao deity a personality), that version is canon for that story but does not become the canon for everyone. Another writer can develop the same area differently. Both can stand.

Over time, certain interpretations may catch on and become widely shared, but this should happen organically, by other writers choosing to use what was built. Not by anyone declaring it official.

A final note

Duela was built to be lived in by stories. The wiki describes the world, but it is not the world. The world is the sum of everything written in it, including what writers write next. The wiki is a starting place, not a ceiling.

Take what you need. Leave the rest open. Treat the load-bearing pieces with respect. Treat everything else as yours.