(Final Fantasy X is the game in question.)
Geography
Spira is a spherical world, but you wouldn't know it from what its people know of it. As far as anyone is aware, it contains exactly one continent with several islands. Its people have enough technology to be able to explore all of it if they want to except for one little thing to be explained. There are a bunch of names below that won't make sense until you read the rest of the thread, so you can come back to this list later.
Relevant locations from the south up are:
- Besaid Island: A teeny tiny island at the very tip of the continent, is only large enough to contain one village. Contains a temple (which is relevant for reasons);
- Kilika Island: A somewhat less tiny island, also contains a temple;
- Luca: Pretty much the most technological place around that doesn't belong to the Al Bhed, it's where Blitzball tournaments, the only form of mass entertainment available, happens. Also the southernmost city on the continent proper;
- Djose Temple: A temple pretty much in the middle of nowhere;
- Moonflow: A very pretty body of water that contains ~spirits~ (actually pyreflies) (it's complicated);
- Guadosalam: The main city of the guado, entrance to the afterlife;
- Thunder Plains: Plains where there's a constant thunderstorm;
- Macalania Woods: A very pretty frozen magical forest. Also has a temple;
- Bevelle: Seat of the World Government And Religion, everything important happens there. Also has a temple;
- Bikanel Island: A desert island. As in, an island with a huge desert. The Al Bhed live there, with their wretched technology;
- The Calm Lands: Large plains where the first battle against Sin (explained below) was fought;
- Remiem Temple: A huge temple hidden in the Calm Lands;
- Cave of the Stolen Fayth: A hidden cave in the Calm Lands where a fayth that was stolen from a temple is hidden;
- Mount Gagazet: A cool mountain chain with lots of floating rocks and passages, home of the ronso;
- Baaj Temple: A hidden temple in a secluded island somewhere;
- Zanarkand: The machina city to the very north, spiritual Mecca, the place to go if you want to fix all the problems ever.
The most common species by far is humans, who live pretty much everywhere (except Guadosalam and Mount Gagazet). Ethnicities as we know them aren't distributed sensibly, except for the Al Bhed, who all have their own island.
The guado are a race of frog elves who are very spiritual and protect the woods and the only known entrance to the afterlife. This gives them some political power but until recently they mostly didn't care and race relations are strained. Interfertile with humans.
The ronso are a race of blue lion people with horns. Not spiritual in the same sense as the frog elves but much more religious. Probably not interfertile with humans but who knows.
The hypello are also frog people but much less spiritual. They don't do much and live pretty much anywhere too, though they come from the Moonflow.
Pyreflies, the Farplane, and monsters
No one really knows what those pretty lights on the Moonflow are, except for "very magical" and "connected to spirits somehow." When someone dies, if they have accepted their death in life, they go straight to the afterlife, the Farplane, which is very pretty but kinda insipid and boring and nothing much happens.
If they resent and grieve their own deaths, they can become trapped, and unless someone (a summoner, explained in a bit) performs a Sending (in which pretty pyreflies leave the bodies of the deceased and go into the sky) (which is funny because the Farplane is actually in the centre of the planet), pyreflies containing their soul will stay around and, eventually, become monsters. When a monster dies, the person (or people) they were goes (go) to the Farplane. If someone had a really really strong reason to stay around, they can actually stay around as Unsent, basically physical ghosts. Being around Sendings is not healthy for them because Sendings don't exactly require consent of the dead, and going to the Farplane via the portal in Guadosalam is also not very good.
Magic and Spheres
There is vague magic of the Final Fantasy style, elemental magic and gravity manipulation and buffs and boosts and stuff. Anyone can learn it.
Also there's a strong "sphere" thing going on, DVDs are actually spheres and you just have to look at them to play it hologram-style, and you learn magic by applying magic spheres to yourself, and some magic spheres can be used to give you completely different magic powers/classes at a time if you want to specialise. The magic spheres that give you power can be manufactured out of pyreflies by specialised people, or sometimes coalesce naturally when a monster dies.
(In-game, the method for becoming more powerful is a "sphere grid" which contains all the magic and strength and power etc and you use magic spheres and move along it. I think I'll do some worldbuilding here and say that the sphere grid is something like a mindscape or something for power which you then activate and move around using the magic spheres.)
Elaboration on pyreflies and magic
History, culture, religion, and Sin
The teachings of Yevon, the main (or only) religion in the world, say that a thousand years ago, a huge war happened that almost destroyed the world, with enormous machina and irresistible firepower. To punish humans for their hubris, Yevon sent a huge whale monster named Sin, which stopped the war by pretty much destroying everything (including Zanarkand, one of the cities involved in the war) and then retreating to the ocean. The almost-starfaring civilisation then became stagnant, because whenever a place becomes too technologically advanced or there are too many people around Sin shows up and destroys everything and kills everyone. It also likes destroying people who try to travel too far away from the mainland, which is why no one's ever managed to explore anything.
The only way to kill Sin is by becoming a summoner and going through a pilgrimage. A summoner is a priest of sorts, except they have magical power to summon big monsters called Aeons. These Aeons are the monster forms of people who sacrificed themselves to become "fayth," stone statues containing the power to give summoners this ability. Summoners walk throughout Spira to pray at temples and join with the fayth so they can commune with them and use their Aeons in battle. Summoners typically have a small group of people that are their Guardians, people trained to protect them in their pilgrimage. The goal of the pilgrimage is gaining enough summoning experience that they can reach Zanarkand and learn how to perform the Final Summoning, which summons an Aeon as big as Sin that then kills Sin.
Who comes back to life a certain number of years later, anyway, and the Sinless period is called the "Calm," which lasts a few years. After the first Calm, the second one took five hundred years to happen. There have been a few more since then.
Also the summoner who killed Sin is awarded the title High Summoner and, well, dies. Because the Final Summoning kills summoner and Sin. So the title is posthumous. We don't actually find this out in-game until much later but, well, it's all voluntary and stuff.
Yevon teaches that only when humanity has atoned for their sins will Sin disappear, and the Final Summoning is a palliative, to give people some peace and rest for a while. Yevon is horribly vague about what "atoning" looks like.
The Al Bhed are special in that they think Yevon is full of shit and continue doing machina research, especially military, so they can try to kill Sin by other methods than just throwing people at it all the time. They're kinda sorta tolerated heretics, present here and there. Most pious people treat them like some religious people on Earth treat gay people (love the sinner, hate the sin, style of thing), most people who aren't particularly pious are sorta wary of them because Sin likes attacking whenever there's too much tech and the Al Bhed are always courting that with theirs.
Furthermore, there's a mystery: two people who say they come from Zanarkand as it was a thousand years ago. Except a bit different. Ten years ago, High Summoner Braska, then just-regular-summoner Braska, also kinda-pariah-because-he-married-an-Al-Bhed Braska, met this guy called Jecht who said he was from a Zanarkand that was an island and was super technological n stuff, except his Zanarkand had never heard of any Bevelles or anything south of it, nor of summoners or Sin. Braska killed Sin, all was well for a while, Sin returned. Meanwhile, in this mysterious island-Zanarkand, Jecht's 17-year-old son Tidus was playing Blitzball in a tournament when Sin attacked. Auron, this mysterious guy who took care of Tidus since (from his perspective) his father disappeared ten years ago, guided Tidus towards the giant monster, and the giant monster ate Tidus, and Tidus washed up in Spira after a bizarre sequence of events involving Al Bhed and weird dreams.
The Truth
Other miscellaneous facts (to be added as I recall them)
- The ronso guard Sacred Mount Gagazet and make sure only the worthy can go on to Zanarkand, and are in general very loyal - as a society, to Yevon, as individuals, to other individuals. They are also more-or-less a warrior race and take pride in battle skills;
- Humans were sort of racist against the guado for the longest time, until Lord Jyscal Guado married a human woman and had a kid with her. Said kid is named Seymour. He's weird. He's also evil and wants to destroy the world because his mother sacrificed herself to become a fayth when he was a kid and he thinks everything in the world is suffering so it might as well end;
- When you reach a temple of Yevon to pray to a fayth and learn to summon it, there is a little challenge thing (involving spheres) before called the Cloister of Trials which you must pass before gaining admittance to the Chamber of the Fayth;
- Pyreflies are what powers spheres, and they can replay events or memories even without said spheres. They react very strongly to the thoughts and emotions of people around them;
- The fayth of Yevon share their consciousness, so when they ask the main characters to kill Sin and end the Dream of the Fayth, this is a "unanimous" decision of all the ex-citizens of Zanarkand Yu Yevon turned into fayth, regardless of the desires of their summoned citizens;
- A person can only be turned into a fayth willingly, they cannot be coerced to do so, and the aeon they generate when they do is associated with their dreams and their very strongest emotion;
- A fayth must willingly offer its aeon to a summoner, but once it has the aeon a summoner calls can be called no matter what the fayth think of this, and are somewhat independent of the fayth that created/is that aeon;
- Sin releases a neurotoxin that makes people who come near him get confused and often hallucinate, but is not fatal;
- Often fiends attach themselves to Sin, and are named Sinspawn, and whenever they get unattached Sin will come back for them if they're alive.
Sequel Worldbuilding
Blitzball
Pyreflies
Main Characters
Canon Plot
- Chapter 1: Zanarkand
- Chapter 2: Besaid (LIN comment)
- Chapter 3: Kilika (LIN comment)
- Chapter 4: S.S. Winno (LIN comment)
- Chapter 5: Luca
- Chapter 6: Luca (LIN comment)
- Chapter 7: The Mi'ihen Highroad - South (LIN comment)
- Chapter 8: The Mi'ihen Highroad - North
- Chapter 9: Operation Mi'ihen (LIN comment)
