World History and Development, Part 1

First, hi, I'm new. Never wrote a blog cause something about it bugged me, but I figure that community input might help me clean up some of my work.

Second, I've worked on a few game ideas in the past, some RPGs and some not, and I want to get one of my RPG settings more polished than previously before. To start, I wrote up a rough "history of the world", trying to give a few different perspectives, in terms of races. To give you a rough idea, imagine it's got the gamut of stereotype fantasy races, with a ley-line magic system and a pinch of political intrigue.

Creating the world isn't the tricky part. I found a piece of software called Fractal Terrains, which apparently is a supermodified version of AutoCAD that allows you to make worlds. Being able to tweak continents, temperate zones, and ocean depths is handy. The trick is when you start to think about populating the world. Countries tend to make themselves: groups of farmers or people tend to become cities, becoming city-states, which eventually evolve into states themselves. The difficulty I have come across with is racial migration patterns. Different races tend to have different social/political systems. I started thinking about where the races would have their "cradle of life", how they originated, if they came from other races, etc. The world I decided to make is big, about 10,000 miles longer around than planet Earth. It has a number of continents, but only a couple are largely habited, and they're on opposite sides of the planet from each other. The other continents tend to be closer to the poles, or are filled with jungle that I've deemed is filled with incredibly dangerous creatures and really bad disease. Only a few people live there, and usually on the coasts. One habitable continent is the largest in the world, and it completely filled with kobolds: they make up nearly a billion in population. So far, only infighting has kept them from taking over the planet. This only leaves one place to start the civilized races: men, elves, dwarves, and caters (gnomes).

Perhaps it was the gods that created the races. Perhaps it was evolutionary. Perhaps they were dropped off by people from another plane. I have not made this decision yet. I do know that I would prefer my gods/pantheon to follow an "ascended mortals" type of setup. Knowing this, I have to decide
- Where the races' cradles are
- How they interact to create the countries I eventually want to see
- How they migrate to create the outlying city-state countries on other continents.
- What kind of conflict tends to be the most prominent? Social status, religion, politics, etc.