WARYAUME is a dark fantasy world with six kingdoms, six languages, its own gods and a ten-volume saga. It shows up as books, films, albums, documentaries and a game. Christophe Fertault has been building it, on and off, since 1991.
What makes it worth your time is how openly Fertault explains the AI side.
If you've ever daydreamed about building your own world, this is what it looks like when someone keeps going and does the paperwork too.
It started as a game
The first idea goes back to 1991: a game about civilizations evolving through history, with magic built into how they evolve. When Civilization came out, Fertault set the project aside.
In 2010 it came back as a strategy game. Fertault filed the WARYAUME trademark, wrote the rules, and a small community of players formed around it for about three years. Then work took over and it went quiet again.
Fertault picked it back up seriously in 2023. Gaming associations started showing it at festivals, which meant real prototypes, boards, mats and players asking questions. Those questions fed the lore. A player noticing an inconsistency mid-game could open a whole new direction for the world.
From there it outgrew the game. The lore turned into videos, documentaries, music videos, albums and eventually films.
Too many jobs for one person
That growth came with a practical problem. Writing, game design, prototyping, graphic design, music, video, editing, languages, websites, documentation. Fertault put it plainly:
"Several authors I spoke with considered a project of this scale almost impossible for one person to carry alone. And they were right. I could not have done all of it by myself."
That's where AI came in. In Fertault's words:
"AI did not create WARYAUME. The project existed long before these tools. But AI allowed me to expand into areas I could not realistically have handled alone and, just as importantly, helped me maintain coherence between all those different branches."
That last part, keeping everything consistent, is the piece I found most useful. When a world has six languages and ten volumes, the hard part is making sure nothing contradicts anything else.
How a song gets made
The Novians are one of WARYAUME's peoples, and their music is where a lot of this started. Fertault's first songs were in French and told pieces of the lore directly, made with Suno, with simple visuals built in Canva and early video tools.
The more Fertault worked on the Novians, the more they seemed to need their own language. That became Draknar. Gemini helped with early names for kingdoms and peoples, and ChatGPT helped develop the language itself.
To keep Draknar consistent, Fertault set up what they call a linguistic specialist role, an AI-assisted role named Eirik Thorsen, alongside an internal Draknar Codex. That way a word used in one song doesn't contradict something established somewhere else.
The loop Fertault describes is: "start from an idea or text in French, translate and adapt it into Draknar, generate the music, listen carefully, correct problems and sometimes generate it again." Fertault listens to a lot of versions before picking one, checking the rhythm and what Fertault calls its overall color.
There's also a filter at the end, which I liked:
"If I cannot visualize something while listening to it, I increasingly prefer to leave the track aside rather than simply ask an AI system to generate random fantasy images and call that a music video."
The video side has its own roles
For video, Fertault works with two more AI-assisted roles. Sofia Kallistrat handles turning music into visual concepts and sequences. Marcus Halvorsen handles cinematic and narrative structure.
The tools today are Google Flow for most of the video generation, Dreamina for some of the voice and character work, and DaVinci Resolve for editing. Fertault's first visual tests for the Novians used Hailuo.
The early videos were put together by instinct. Over time Fertault got much stricter about shot order, continuity, color and generation artifacts, and went back and remastered the Novians III videos as the tools improved.
The goal for each video is to reveal a piece of the lore. Someone might click expecting another Viking-style song and find a god, a ritual or a creature that only exists in WARYAUME.
One answer leads to the next question
Fertault's example is Drekk Argonak, a dark passage between the human world and the realm of Argone, which the Novians cross to fight demonic forces. It started as a musical mood. Then the questions started. Why does the passage exist, who comes through it, who commands them, what are the rules about death?
A song can lead to a video, the video to a documentary that has to explain a god, and the god to a whole pantheon, religions and even game rules. Fertault calls it "conducting a reverse investigation inside my own world," sometimes landing on an idea for Volume 7 before Volume 0 is finished and working backwards until it holds together.
That's why every piece connects. As Fertault put it in an earlier email:
"A Novian song may exist because that culture exists inside WARYAUME; a documentary may explain that culture; a cinematic sequence may show one of its rituals; and a game or story may let people experience another part of the same timeline."
Where to start
The main site is now WARYAUME.com, and the older sites are being folded into it. The WARYAUME lore site still has pages on the peoples, gods, guilds, a bestiary and a chronology. @waryaume on YouTube has the music, and Life in Waryaume on YouTube has the films.
If you want one first stop, the music overview is a good one.
What's out and what's next
Fertault has been a songwriter and composer since 1994 and a member of SUISA, the Swiss authors' society, since 2000. On the music side, Novians II came out in 2025, followed by Novians III and IV, and Shael'Thor II is on Spotify.
The books are the backbone. Volumes 0 and 1 of the saga are being written now, and each has already passed 200 pages. The books carry the long timeline and the characters' lives, while the films, songs and documentaries each zoom in on one battle, ritual or culture.
A store is coming, and there's a Ko-fi, but Fertault asked for something else first: watch, listen, ask questions and talk about it.
"What I really want to build is a community, rather than simply accumulate an audience."
Thanks to Chris Fertault for answering my questions so thoroughly, and for walking me through the history and the process behind WARYAUME. It made this a much better piece.