"Something like that, or - the difference between a dragon and a peasant."

"Well, the dragons will just burn the peasants unless someone's really good and really lucky with a bow.  That's different - with knights and hedge-witches, they'll usually defeat any hedge-witch, unless she's set a trap - but there're so many of them, so there's a balance usually."

"Yes, that's the point.  That - normally you would expect a polity with even crude - command of techne, to steal a word several generations backwards from the whole 'tech level' thing - to have a sort of dragon-vs.-let-me-just-specify-unarmed-peasant, advantage, when in practice it'd been shown as - working out oddly evenly?"

"And in this Azaroth story... game?... they weren't?  And you want to choose one 'tech level' for everyone?  That sounds easy, unless there's something specific about the other tech levels you want to keep?  And we can say that any higher-tech-level things are really recent - maybe the alien space goats brought them - and they haven't had time to get organized to sweep over everywhere yet.  Maybe that's what's going on with the Demon Lord!"

"...No I'm saying that the situation we're in wants me to choose a single tech level and I don't think that that necessarily makes sense if I'm trying to - replicate the results of a bunch of writers throwing cool shit at the wall and hoping it stuck.

"So I'm very confused at - how my impression of your impression of what I just said, is pretty much the exact opposite?"

"Oh, you want to keep a lot about how Azaroth looked!  I'm afraid, well, I haven't seen Azaroth so I'm not sure how to help."

"Az-er-oth, but, yeah.  Part of the really - enchanting quality of it - was that you really had distinct zonal and factional identities in terms of...just the sort of stuff you found there?"

"So have really different countries in terms of their... types of crafts and objects?  And maybe the different sorts of animal-people too?  And what sort of magic they tend to use?"

"Yeah.  But at the same time - I'm trying to reconcile why on earth wood-hulled boats still existed, and not only that but as the primary non-portal-based means of intercontinental travel - given that dwarves absolutely had the tech for ironclads and gnomes - working out of Ironforge for reasons - had even installed a whole entire underground tram line between the dwarven and human capitals, so it wasn't just an access problem!"

"Do you want something like that in the world of Villarosa?  Could the dwarves-by-whatever-name perhaps have just recently developed things like that?"

"I guess?  But - hmm.  Let me think about this, actually.

"...thinking about the failure modes of gnomish tech, I bet I know why its analogue wouldn't spread very far - it's too full of chaos for all but the dedicated engineers.

"And Ironforge's equivalent taking a very 'slow and steady wins the race' position in counterpoint, almost more like Warhammer's Dawi...I could see it."

"Yes, magical technology can add any number of complications."

"And since the technology is fundamentally built atop the magic instead of - having baseline Earthling physics -

"And of course there's applied thaumaturgy, from the pure-magic side of things, for your floating cities and whatnot...or shadow magic, for the daring - or desperate."

"So where is Villarosa... where are we... amid all this?  I think I need to know some more about it to finish designing it."

"Yeah, that's the question, isn't it?  Angel darling, can you give us a world map of some sort or tools to make one?  Or just a big honking bowl of dice and a big sheet of paper, that'd probably do...Ugh, I'm not a climatologist.  Let alone someone who studies climate genesis.  I know there were bands of circulating air current on Earth...enough to yeet Saharan dust across an entire ocean, come to think of it.  If I recall correctly.  But I'm not immediately sure why that came about..."

"Oh, don't worry about that, Alicia - just tell them the climate you want, and the worldbuilding team will take care of that."

Still, with a smile, she manifests a large pad of paper and a sand tray.

"It's not the climate I'm worrying about specifically, so much as - politics arises from geographic concerns."

"... Say what politics you want, and the worldbuilding team will figure out a geography to generate them."

"I am not actually good at open-ended questions like that!"

"All right!  I'm thinking let's have three main concentrations of power - the king's from one, and the other ones can be powerful noblemen who're also of course mages.  Things have been stable, but -"

"- Sorry, Alicia, you want me to go on, or you want to draw a map or something?"

"I - want to have something that doesn't feel like I'm worldbuilding in an empty void?"

"All right..." Lila slowly says, confused.

Lila picks up a pen and draws on the top sheet of paper a roughly-Y-shaped river, with hills in-between the two stems of the "Y", and a small picture of a castle on the right stem.

She holds out another pen to Alicia.

Alicia makes a vaguely frustrated noise, taking the pen as she does.  "That's not - sufficient - that's the step after the step we're on right now -"

"I'm not even sure how gravity works in this universe.  If it does.  I suppose we have Newtonian mechanics...Wait, but portals.  Therefore we have something like spacetime, which can be bent, warped...Unless it's some coordinate-system fuckery that violates conservation of angular momentum, which, sure, why not...Okay.  Okay.  That isn't immediately relevant anyway."

"Let's say gravity works the same way it does where we're from - wait, it does work the same way where you're from and where I'm from, right?"