The Spellbinder World was conceptualized as a speculative exercise of what might occur if a teenager was transported to a world in which the Industrial Revolution did not happen. To create a sense of mystery, series creators Mark Shirrefs and John Thomson, "came up with the idea of the Spellbinders who kept control of their world by controlling knowledge" .They decided that the Spellbinder world was undergoing a partially self-inflicted dark age following a civilizational collapse triggered by a man made ecological disaster. Series creators specify that the Spellbinders decision to control knowledge was because this world had almost been destroyed hundreds of years earlier by massive experiments with electromagnetism - like the dangers we face with nuclear power, and they feared that if knowledge got out of control, it would happen again. Of course, this also meant that they led privileged lives and privilege is hard to give up. The people Paul encounters in this world belong to a medieval-like society ruled by a group of magician-knights known as Spellbinders, who use ancient high-technology to rule over an ignorant serf population on the remaining inhabitable territory.
