I've packed a truly ludicrous amount of mythological lore into my world-building. All you need to do is look at my world bible to start to get an idea of just how seriously I based this world off of many different things.
Hello everyone. I have finally gotten around to putting some serious effort into developing the world bible for my Key to the Void series. The kinds of information I have since started coming up with have turned out a little too thick and heavy for the occasional casual lore chapter...
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My creation story for my world is based straight out of the Babylonian creation myth. The earlier portions of it are almost exactly the same, with only a little of my own spin. It also incorporates a little bit of Hindu lore in the form of including Bahamut.
(The real Bahamut, not the dragon from D&D and the Final Fantasy series. I'm talking about the mighty leviathin-scale creature. Speaking of which, mythological leviathins outclass dragons by several levels of magnitude. Dragons are just dragons, having no more or less than the powers we commonly attribute to them today. In fact, modern fantasy has actually powered up dragons compared to their origins. Leviathins in their original mythology, on the other hand, were always portrayed as primordial-scale creatures that have powers able to create or destroy entire worlds.)
I also use a little bit of the Chinese 4 guardians lore, putting a heavy bit of my own spin on it once again but somehow actually getting closer to their original versions than most modern portrayals do. My guardians of the North and East are far more accurate to their original lore, my Vermillion bird is a cross between all 3 of the famous birds of fire. (I call it the fire bird for Slavic, it is the guardian of the south for Chinese, and it has rebirth from flames power like the Phoenix of Egyptian lore.) My guardian of the West is probably the most corrupted of the 4 compared to the original lore. I just thought a white tiger was too boring, so I added a black wolf and made the two eternal adversaries for a bit of a yin-yang theme.
I've also borrowed a little more from Hindu lore in the form of Avatars, although while god avatars do exist in my world I actually use it a little differently. My avatars are avatars of concepts and stories, and they are very important to the power system in my world. (For instance, my guardians are all avatars. The fire bird would be the best example of the concept. The fire bird (who has the phoenix powers) is the avatar of eras. He always dies whenever there is a time of chaos and upset in the world that is massive enough to shift the world, and then the newly born fire bird will seek out the person who will be most influential in driving the next era to give it's blessing to.)
Yeah, the lore in my story is pretty well researched. Those are the most prominent points I just brought up, but I have woven well-researched and well woven together lore of several cultures into what I think is a pretty cohesive tapestry. An example of some of my lower scale world-building inclusions would be that for my "beastfolk" races, there are several tribes that are named after the creatures in the real world lore. For instance, there is a prominent human-dog tribe called the "Aldet." Aldet was a creature in Egyptian lore that was a human with the head of a dog. (Not to be confused with Anubis, who was a specific god with the head of a Jackal. Aldet refers to dog-headed humans in general, making no specification to what species of dog.)