Wisdom City is a fictional place that exists in an equally fictional reality I call The Wisdomverse.

In many ways, Wisdom City is much like any large city you might encounter in our Universe, or at least those ones in which the majority of the inhabitants don’t breathe methane and don’t have lots of tentacles and eyes and very sharp teeth [1].

In fact, while I first started writing about Wisdom City before I’d seen much of the world, it eventually began to take real shape for me after visiting cities like New York and San Francisco. While I’ve never felt that Wisdom City was particularly based on any real city, visiting places like these helped me get an impression of metropolises (metropolii?) that were immense in size and rich in diversity.

Because I grew up enjoying fantasy fiction and superhero comics, it seemed natural to me that Wisdom City would feature both. In particular, when I first began mapping out the ideas that became Wisdom City, I was inspired, in a humorous way, by experiences of playing Dungeons And Dragons and other, similar RPG games.

I thought to myself at the time, "Wouldn’t it be funny if you had sword and sorcery heroes situated in a modern environment, concerned with things like experience points and booty and who got to rescue which Princess, but still having to deal with things like traffic jams and mindless bureaucracy?" And, it turns out, it was funny. Well, you know, to me at least.

The Superhero story lines, on the other hand, evolved a little later. Originally I had these cast in an entirely separate reality, simply generically called ‘The City’ (as in, "The City never sleeps at night…"), and then at some point I decided that there was no reason why fantasy characters set in a ‘contemporary’ environment couldn’t live alongside superhero characters set in a similar environment. Or maybe I didn’t decide this. It’s possible the two different story concepts merely grew together over time.

And it was in this way that Wisdom City, as I currently write about it, was born.

The City Itself

To best imagine Wisdom City the way it exists in my head, take a city like New York (or whichever large city with which you are most familiar), and collide it at high speed with a city drawn entirely from a fantasy realm. The mess you have left over will be not too far away from Wisdom City.

So, there are skyscrapers and a downtown precinct, and a waterfront, and delis, and cafes, and apartment buildings, and parks, and everything else you would expect of a modern metropolis.

But there are also temples, and castles, and dungeons, and forgotten treasures, and dragon lairs.

There are Elves and accountants, sorcerors and policemen, Demon Gods From The Infernal Realms and the stock market.

In theory, Wisdom City is infinite while being simultaneously finite, both conceptually and as I physically imagine it to be.

Because reality is somewhat rubbery in Wisdom City (not to mention a little sticky, for reasons not quite understood by anyone outside the Mage Guild), there are areas of the city in which entire ‘sub realms’ can be discovered, some of which are blissfully unaware of the fact that they exist within the broader framework of the city. One such is an area physically about the size of Central Park in New York, called Darkwood Forest, which is a largely endless purely fantasy realm once you enter it. I haven’t written much about Darkwood Forest thus far, but it’s always there if and when I need it.

The History Of Wisdom City

I have to admit that I only have a tenuous sketching of the history of Wisdom City. Up to this point I’ve been more interested in writing about the things that have been taking place in the city ‘now’, as opposed to what has taken place in the past.

That said, I do know that Wisdom City has existed in its location for hundreds, if not thousands, of years; though it’s safe to say that it has almost certainly been burned down or otherwise destroyed a number of times since it was first inhabited, and any number of different ‘Wisdom Cities’ have been rebuilt in its place.

If I sit and think about the history of the city for any length of time, aside from getting a mild headache, I imagine it as having a turbulent past in which countless exciting things have taken place. Revolutions, regicides, the curse of The Holy Requisition, empires and ruin, discovery and dark ages.

I tend to draw back to these things when I need to while writing about the city as it is now, and I suspect that I have a lot of details built into storylines that heavily contradict each other. I have to admit, I’m not too worried by this, since there’s every chance that through the intercession of Magic and the whims of various Gods, two or more very different Wisdom Cities might have existed in the same place at the same time, but in different sub-realities.

I should also mention that simply through the reality of having to earn a living, and thus being only able to work on Wisdom City when time and energy allows, I probably haven’t focused on its history in the way I would have liked. Also, there’s that lack of talent and imagination to constantly struggle against.

That’s where it would be wonderful to be a Terry Pratchett, who can devote himself entirely to his creations, and can obviously afford (or, more likely, his publishers can obviously afford) to enlist cleverly artistic people to help him realise these ideas in drawings and maps and whatnot. However, Pratchett obviously has bucketloads of talent and imagination to spare, so he probably wouldn’t have needed any of these to help him get closer to his ideas. Damn his excessively talented eyes.

Outside The City

What I have done, however, is create an accompanying broader reality in which Wisdom City exists. Some of these places and localities existed in my creative writing long before Wisdom City took shape, but they thankfully have fit seamlessly into the hodgepodge reality I’ve created, so I’ve plagiarised myself mercilessly wherever possible.

The future can only tell if I’ll write all that much about these places, but again, it’s nice to know all that material is there if I need to throw my characters into the mysterious, snowbound northern kingdom of Carcass Deep, or have them riding like the wind across The Western Steppes, or indeed trying to solve a particularly diabolical slaying in the extensive grounds of Murder Mansion.

The Introduction, In The Introduction

Below are the couple of paragraphs I wrote for myself some time ago to help me set the mood of Wisdom City content:

Wisdom City is just like your city, except that in many cases it isn’t.

It is home to Heroes, Superheroes, Villains, Gods, Demons, Elves, Half-Orcs, Full-Orcs, People-Who-Aren’t-Really-Orcs-But-Who-Have-Bad-Table-Manners-All-The-Same, and many other creatures, both real and imaginary, besides.

Wisdom City manages to combine the magic-and-mayhem fantasy of loinclothed barbarians with the ultra-contemporary metropolis of Superheroes and Supervillains largely because it’s creator decided to ignore the many differences these two disparate genres imply.

And so it is that in Wisdom City two sword-wielding Heroes can sit in a cafe and argue about the best way to attack a Level 9 Castle, while in another part of the city a crime-fighting duo could well be having the crap kicked out of them by a Supervillain, who generally don’t like being interrupted while plotting world domination.

And there, as the saying goes, you have it.