How do I turn a hand draw map into an interactive piece of world build.
[deleted]
u/[deleted] — 5 days ago
We are three brothers. We have been building this world since we were children. This is what we made.
When our parents went to sleep, we kept going. the result is pax-axum.lovable.app
Our father told us about our heritage when he had time. Yoruba names and their meanings, the greatness of the Benin Empire, the kings who were also priests. Our mother fed our imaginations every night with tales of Roland, Joan of Arc and Saint Francis of Assisi.
When they went to bed, the three of us kept telling each other stories in the dark.
That was twenty years ago.
We are brothers. Two twins and a younger sibling, of Ugandan and Nigerian heritage, raised between London, Kampala, China, and the United States. We have spent twenty years building a world we needed to exist. We built it the way families build things: imperfectly, collaboratively, stubbornly, with arguments that lasted years and decisions that only made sense in retrospect.
The result is The Wooden Bible. This is what it is about. On graduation day, Edubis of Axum wakes before the bells.
He has spent six years sleeping beside the communal toilet at the Seminary of the Prophet. Not by accident. Nothing in that institution is accidental. They wanted him to know his place.
He washes in cold water. Dresses in silence. Goes to the ceremony.
He finds his name on the ranking board.
Scripture: Exemplary. Tactical History: Exemplary. Languages: Exemplary. Logic: Exemplary. Combat: Exemplary.
Then: Communal Temperament, Deficient. Spiritual Obedience, Deficient. Recommended Ecclesiastical Rank, Denied.
A clerk hands him a military conscription notice and says congratulations while already looking for someone whose future matters.
He reads his name twice.
Not because he misunderstood it.
Because some stupid animal part of him had hoped. The world Edubis moves through draws structurally from the Kingdom of Benin, the Holy Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Axumite Kingdom, the Islamic Golden Age, the Aztec and Maya civilisations, the Lakota and Haudenosaunee nations. Not as decoration, but as the skeleton of how power, religion, and collapse actually work.
At the centre of it is the Church of Balance. An institution that has decided, in advance, who is worthy. That controls what people remember. That corrects rather than punishes, always corrects, the way you shave rot from meat.
The Wooden Bible is not a book of scripture. It is a method. A way of understanding how gods, places, names, wounds, and human beings bind to one another. The Church found one piece of it and built a civilisation around the claim that the piece was the whole.
Edubis knows otherwise. We did not set out to write a political book. We set out to write about people. But people exist inside systems, and systems have consequences, and eventually the story insisted on being honest about that.
We followed it.
This is the epic fantasy we needed when we were children telling each other stories in the dark. We built it for our younger selves. And for anyone who has ever been told that a people can be unmade.
They cannot.
Chapter One is free to read. Happy to go deep on the world, the religions, the civilisations, the characters, any of it. This is the part we love most. Ask question we give feed back love it hate it we want to know.
u/ore_smith — 7 days ago