The World of Mattson
I like our world. There are a lot of neat stories floating around it already, but I always wished it had a bit more magic in it. There are plenty of myths and legends of magic, but I don’t always see a ton of it today. Still, on the whole it’s not a bad place, and that’s why I decided to set Mattson Academy in our world.
More or less.
The story takes place in a rough approximation of our world, but one where all the myths and legends and epic sagas you had to read about at some point in English class actually happened. All of that started with the magic system in Mattson, which I’ve talked about at length, but one of the major goals of it was to make it broad enough to incorporate a lot of different cultures’ myths and legends and explain how they might have been done by the Magi of my world. The easiest of these are things like Norse and Greek mythology. Elemental magic is a huge component of the magic system, so it’s not a stretch for me to say that figures like Zeus and Thor were talented Lightning Magi whose deeds were inflated into epic legends and ultimately godhood over the intervening years.
Many of the schools in the world of Mattson fall into this category as well. I looked for places and people with a lot of magic and mystery surrounding them and just said, “What if that, but real?” The go-to example here would be the titular Mattson Academy. Situated not far outside Philadelphia, Mattson Academy is inspired by the the real life Margaret Mattson, a woman tried in Philadelphia for, you guessed it, being a witch. She was found sort of innocent, and I thought, “What if she learned a lesson from the close call and moved her activities to somewhere more secretive. What if she started a hidden magic school?” Mattson Academy was born.
Other schools follow similar patterns. Merlin Academy is obvious, but there’s also Rasputin Hall, inspired by many of the tales surrounding Grigori Rasputin–he had to be magic, right? There’s a school in Egypt that capitalizes on the Egyptian Pantheon and many of the rituals and practices there. There is one in Brazil at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon Rivers. There’s even one at the North Pole. Three guesses who teaches up there.
Then there are the monsters and the non-human races. Again, there’s a wealth of stories to choose from. I grew up on The Hobbit and LOTR, and more recently, I was VERY invested in World of Warcraft, so I have a lot of love for all the classics: elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, etc. But I love mermaids, so they’re in there. I love werewolves, so I added them. Dragons? We got ‘em. It might sound a bit chaotic, but (I hope) it all makes sense in the context of the world, because we already have all those stories. They came from the context of our world.
The monsters are the same. I don’t want to get into too many spoilers, but a lot of the monsters that show up in Mattson already exist within our folklore. When I needed a monster for a scene, I rarely made one up. I looked for one we already had and adapted it to the story. One that got cut for space was the chupacabra. That’s a cool, scary monster. Why make something up when “the goat-sucker” is already roaming the countryside sucking goats?
We’ve got a lot of good stories. Plenty of minds have asked what if this one or that one actually happened? With Mattson Academy, I wanted to go one step further and say, “What if they all did?
Final note: this does allow for me to get cheeky when I DON’T want something in the world, and can use it for a laugh. “You thought we had ghosts? We’ve got werewolves, dragons, faeries golems, etc, etc. But why would you think we’d have ghosts?”
