My original seed wasn't much of anything I began with a character who had just killed a god. The surrounding story was peoples reaction to the event and the character. It has since then changed drastically, but the premise of power, strong motivations, and magic is still a big part of the process. For example there is a grand evil, but the lesser evil that is really centerstage in the stories fears it and hold very different motivations than it in terms of how it wants control. The second one was a more generic seed. I looked at the world of magical creatures we had and saw all the variants in design for things like werewolves, vampires, the undead, etc. What if they were all real? If these magical creatures had different species like any other type of animal? What traits would be different? Would a trait be how human or wolf a werewolf actually looks? Or would it be how much control they were in when they changed. It started from that and has since morphed into something very early in development, but it's cool.
I can definitely see speciation in legendary creatures. Not only is there of course plenty of room to make up traits wholesale, but that's also a way to explain how multiple legends have different varieties of creatures. For instance, Nosferatu and Dracula are very different vampires. Of course there's the fast zombies and the slow zombies, as well as all manner of ghosts and apparitions with varying amounts of visibility and ability to touch and manipulate their environment. I'd definitely like to see a world with a theme like that. Any ideas for a particular era? Modern? Medieval? Victorian?
I imagined modern era just because I wanted to include myths across the world. The main character is a species of werewolf from the northern Inuit mythos. To be more specific it was an Amarok, they are among the rarer forms of werewolf. They are called hunters of hunters so more often than not they are assassins or bounty hunters for the world of legendary creatures. It stuff like that I work on when I'm not working on my main piece.
Awesome concept. Sounds like it's worthy of at least one novel, though I can see it working in an interesting fashion if it were multiple novels where each had a different main character that it followed. Since you mentioned werewolves and Inuits, I'm reminded of 30 Days of Night... about vampires, but I like the idea of werewolves in a similar environment better. Though I'm guessing that by it's nature, the tone you're striving for is a more action than horror? If so, I can also really see it working as a comic book or graphic novel.
Well, like I said it is still pretty early in development, so I was really unsure of the direction. I really only have a few speciations of vampire, werewolves, and some ghosts. This seed came about maybe a few months ago. I actually imagined it a graphic novel too sometimes.