Things That I Like: Cosmogonical Fiction

Things That I Like: Cosmogonical Fiction

What’s that, you may ask? Let’s start out with a few examples. Spoilers will be everywhere, so be warned.

Unknown Armies is a game that divides itself into three levels: street, global, and cosmic. In cosmic-level games, the players are trying to live their lives so as to imitate particular Archetypes strongly enough to ascend to a higher state of existence and become one of the 333 members of the Invisible Clergy. When their ranks are filled this universe will come to an end and a new one will be born under their direction.

Nexus War and its replacement Nexus Clash are a pair of browser-based MMORPGs that are about a conflict taking place after the end of the universe. The player characters are people taken from various worlds and points in the history of the last universe, and placed in a battlefield made partly of eternal planes and partly of post-apocalyptic flotsam. Their actions strengthen and weaken the various gods (and fixing things can be as useful as killing your god’s enemies, if he’s the craftsgod). The strongest god out of the nine will be the one who will exert the greatest amount of influence in creating the next universe. This will affect everything from how many spatial and temporal dimensions exist to how death works (or doesn’t) to how integral violence is to the very fabric of reality in that universe.

Homestuck is a really, really long webcomic (658,000 words and counting) that is, basically, about these kids who play a game called Sburb that sends them into another world. In the process this destroys Earth, and their actions in this other world will contribute to the creation of a whole new universe.

A Dry, Quiet War is a bit off from the others in that there is a war at the end of time— it’s literally called “the Big War at the End of Time”— but it isn’t being fought to determine the nature of the next universe. Rather, in crazy stable time loop shenanigans, the war is being fought in order to determine the nature of this universe. As Colonel Bone explains, “In the future, we won. I won, my command won it. Really, really big. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re all here.”

What do these have in common?

There is a conflict being fought by persons or groups. They may be fighting each other, as in Unknown Armies and Nexus War, or against the environment or another group which has no chance of influencing the universe, as in Homestuck, where the Dersites can only prevent the creation of the new universe, not twist it to their own aims.

The conflict generally involves an amount of violence, but violence typically isn’t the only factor. 

• In Unknown Armies you have to act in a way that befits your Archetype, and acting against this can actually reduce your power.
• In Homestuck, catching frogs is one of most important tasks out there, and building houses is also a pretty big thing.
• As mentioned before, in the Nexus games something as simple as repairing or building a door can help out your side.

The participants generally ascend to greater power in the course of events, whether or not they are directly responsible for creating the new universe or merely facilitating it:

• Characters in Unknown Armies gain godlike powers.
• In Homestuck, Sburb’s players have the potential to ascend to the “god tiers” and get other abilities along the way,
• The champions of the Elder Powers in the Nexus games can become angels, demons, vampires, and more.
• Those who fought in the Big War at the End of Time are almost like eldritch horrors by the end. Some of this is merely technological, such as how Colonel Bones’ nerves have been replaced by wires, but then there’s stuff like how he kills somebody so that that the other guy is plain wiped from existence.

Finally, those involved may have to destroy this universe or a part of it in the process of creating the new one. Indeed, destruction is necessary in three of the above four, and in two of those the forces of creation are apparently convinced that they are an IKEA and all universes must go.

These stories are to be distinguished from games like Mage or Esoterrorists, or stories like Fritz Leiber’s Change War series because the nature of this reality is set in stone. Even if you’re fighting for this universe’s nature, as in A Dry, Quiet War, there’s really no hope of changing the outcome. You’re just fighting because you fought, and it’s impossible to change time no matter what, or there will be other reasons for you to fight, or breaking the time loop does bad things to you but to everybody else in the timeline-as-it-should-have-happened it’s as if nothing different went down (as in Homestuck but also as in The Men Who Murdered Mohammed).

What’s the point of writing all this out?

I think that these examples represent a legitimate pattern of story. Hence why I bothered to give them a name. But, and here’s a point, I had to give them a name. It’s a real pattern, but not one that’s been recognized yet. Probably because it is, I’ll freely admit, pretty minor.

But these can’t be the only stories of their kind. Are there any other examples that come to mind? Or common elements that I’ve missed?

(And does anyone think that it’s an interesting enough pattern to use for a story, or am I the only one?)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Worldbuilding Wednesday: Parasite-Concepts from Alternate or Failed Universes

Wherein I take some time to expand a concept of mine and see how far I can take it. I have something like 50 pages of story ideas (just the ones I've sorted, moreover) and this will be an exercise in seeing how much potential they have. 

This one isn't so stream-of-consciousness, since I had some time to think about it before starting. Oops. I try to not do that, but sometimes it happens anyway. 

There are things that have been destroyed and written out of reality: histories that no longer happened, colors that don't exist anymore, emotions that nobody can experience now, lifeforms that never walked the Earth... Perhaps they're what was erased from the drawing board once God decided what would be included, or the remnants of dead universes, but they existed once and now they have ceased to exist so completely that for all intents and purposes they never existed. 

Except, they sort of do. Some of them, anyway. 

World: The Science Crusade

Not a Worldbuilding Wednesday post. I know what I would do with this world, if I did anything with it, but with so many other things on my plate I'm not sure if I will get to it. It has been sitting on my computer for years now, and I haven't so much as added a single line to it, which does not bode well for its future.

This is an alternate history that, courtesy of Alien Space Bat-aided shenanigans, would have explored the idea that religion doesn't create a certain number of crazies but acts a lightning rod for them and frees up secularism somewhat in the process. The ASB in question in the Blasphemous Equation, which mathematically disproved the existence of God &c &c, yes I know that it wouldn't make too much headway even if it happened, but alien space bats.

Worldbuilding Wednesday: Twelve Domains

Wherein I take an hour or two to expand a concept of mine and see how far I can take it. I have something like 50 pages of story ideas (just the ones I've sorted, moreover) and this will be an exercise in seeing how much potential they have. It's all basically stream of consciousness, thrown out as it occurs to me, with only some polishing at the end to make sure that everything is grammatically correct and I didn't leave any sentences incomplete.

Like last week's entry, I took a bit more than two hours to work on this post, specifically the part where I look at the other Domains and throw some traits down. 

There are twelve Domains, including Earth. Each one is a parallel universe with four Constants, or principles, which differentiate it from the other Domains. For example, in one of the Domains matter reflects the mind; how you look depends on your personality, current thoughts, &c. Earth also has some Constants, and so it is not at all the "baseline" world that provides a yardstick for normality.

Worldbuilding Wednesday: Basement!Narnia

Wherein I take an hour or two to expand a concept of mine and see how far I can take it. I have something like 50 pages of story ideas (just the ones I've sorted, moreover) and this will be an exercise in seeing how much potential they have. It's all basically stream of consciousness, thrown out as it occurs to me, with only some polishing at the end to make sure that everything is grammatically correct and I didn't leave any sentences incomplete.

This one is a little unusual in that there are some parts that I've already figured out beforehand, so this isn't solely comprised of stuff that I came up with in a 1-2 hour brainstorming session. I also did most of the number-crunching outside of this session, and then went back and edited where appropriate. 

There is a basement somewhere. An apartment complex, say. You go to the basement, and there are stairs leading down to another level. And another. And another. It keeps going on for a long, long time., and the levels get weirder and bigger but the urban environment never actually stops being a thing. Think Basement!Narnia, except that it's a bunch of rooms and stuff. From its brief discussion on reddit, it's been compared to Narnia crossed with House of Leaves and Neverwhere crossed with City of Angles.

Things That I Like: 5 More Worlds and Cities

More cities and worlds to adapt or use unchanged for your stories and games.

1. The Magic Dyson Sphere

I’m not sure where this idea came from, but what if magical energy came from a variety of places, and one of those was the process of decomposition as it occurred in a god? You would have wizards ganging up around that thing like nobody’s business, soaking up magic rays like a lazy cat. Well, maybe not quite like that. But it would be a pretty popular place.

Things That I Like: 4 Worlds and Cities

A collection of cities and worlds to draw inspiration from or use outright for your own settings.

1. The Arcane City

Assume, to be totally arbitrary, a council of thirteen archmages. Below them are seven circles of seven mages each, and below these are one hundred apprentice mages at various stages of learning. They are not permitted to learn the higher arts of magecraft until an opening appears in one of the seven circles (This may determine what learning they specialize in, if that’s what you’d like. One interesting ramification of this is that a chosen apprentice could potentially have to choose between entering into a school of magic which ze has no interest in, or passing up advancement this time around but risk never being chosen again).

CYOA brainstorming: The Island (Candid version)

What is this?

Island CYOAs were (are?) a fad on /tg/. I know of almost a dozen, and I come across a new one every so often. The idea behind each of them is the same (you find yourself on a spooky island thing, GO) but they differ in the options that they give. They also differ in how many options you can pick before you have to start taking penalties.

This one is not particularly forgiving.

Shelter: None
Companion: The Necromancer
Artifact: The Amulet, Possessed Sword
Covenant: Abominations
Nemesis: Fear and Madness, The Other

Oh, and The Other gets some choices too, dang it:
Shelter: Gypsy Caravan
Companion: The Other (a different one), the Blackbark Faerie
Artifact: The Sarcophagus
Covenant: Island Guardians
Nemesis: The protagonist

So what have we got here?

Our protagonist has been displaced to some horrible Otherworld. It matters not whether it's an actual island or not, though we'll refer to it as such for convenience's sake. It's a very dangerous place, inhabited by all kinds of horrible things. There was apparently a magi-tech kind of civilization based here, but it's anyone's guess what happened to them.

Perhaps the Island got them. It has a will of its own, certainly. And it's out for the protagonist's blood.

To that effect it has also plucked up two of the protagonists friends. Perhaps the protagonist's appearance here is a fluke, but theirs was certainly not. They have been told that the protagonist is a very, very bad person now, and that killing zem is of the utmost importance. Letting zem live will do nobody any good, but will mean the deaths of millions.

It may hurt them to believe it, but they've been thoroughly convinced that ze's somehow gone down a bad road.

The statuesque servants of the old civilization are at their disposal. The faeries of the Island, who may be connected or have simply moved in after the original inhabitants left, are responsible for conveying the Islands orders, and one of them is accompanying the protagonist's friends to help them on their quest. They are traveling with other humans (who, unlike the faeries, are definitely latecomers to the Island), who are not noteworthy for their combat skills but know the roads of the Island. And one of them has slight precognitive abilities that should be of help.

Should they die by anyone's hand but the protagonist's, the Island will be able to revive them.

But the worst thing is... our protagonist can't be totally sure that they're wrong. The protagonist has fallen in with some potentially bad company, an amoral necromancer whose reason for tagging along is unknown, and has explained the situation to the protagonist. The necromancer is definitely not popular in these parts, though, especially among the undead (of which there are many). And... there are horrible Lovecraftian monsters that like you. Which is probably not a good sign.

Finally, the protagonist is in possession of a thinking sword. It can steadily improve the protagonist's skill over time, but it is also the source of a growing compulsion to kill. The amulet, which confers both physical and mental health, is keeping its influence at bay, but the amulet will be effective for only so long.

CYOA brainstorming: Domain Master

What is this all about?

Affinity Technology/Acoustics

Size class Giant

Race Monstrous/Construct

Boss perks Vitality prowess, charisma prowess, arena manipulation, phylactery, hybrid, empowerment, shapeshifting, enchanted armor, enchanted weapon, perception prowess

Minion races Humanoid, celestial 

Minion size classes Human, Colossal (only celestials)

Mooks Soldiers (100), clerics (25), slaves (50), recruiters (25)

Elites Warriors (10), craftsmen (10), agents (20), battle mages (20)

Lieutenants Chosen, Hunter

Minion perks Sustenance, training, faction

Realm perks Expansion, hidden

Complications Benevolent, whispers

Idea: Once a Slavetrader, Always a Santa Claus

Cast your thoughts back to the last ice age, for it is then that our tale begins.

Fairieland, you see, is a very cold place, a veritable winter wasteland. Its inhabitants don’t deal very well with heat. It is for this reason that the Good People aren’t so common in modern times, but back in the bad old days they flitted in and out of their Grand Doors to our world (and to many other worlds as well, but for those we humans neither had nor have no concern).

The Journeymen [D]

The Shifting Spirits

The Shifting Spirits are liars who are the sole survivors of a now-dead realm which was torn apart by outsiders— or they themselves are outsiders who have learned to coexist with Creation— or they were exiled from a prosperous series of timelines for their grave crimes— or they have achieved time travel and are working to ensure that the course of events which led to their existence will come to pass— or they are the servants of the Powers Major. Their forms are as fluid as water and revert to solidity with a thought, taking on any form which they would like.

The Journeymen [C]

Magic

After the Journeymen and their more-normal companions, the most-common travelers between worlds (whether those worlds be timelines or realms) are the Users, whose only commonality is that they use magic, and who nearly always use it in entirely different ways, as they’re from different realms, and who even are called by different names, depending on where they hail from.

The Journeymen [B]

Now, this setting needs wanderers. Odysseans. Cains. You know, the Doctor. Those mysterious people who go from place to place, realm to realm, doing things and maybe, but maybe not, trying to clean the wreckage that they leave behind.

So let's have them. We'll call them the Journeymen. I can’t quite remember how I came up with this, I was just throwing ideas around in my skull, but even though it’s hokey and corny, I like it. That’s what they are, in the end. But it’s not just that they’re walking ‘round Creation doing things. No, they’re journeymen in a more literal sense.

The Journeymen [A]

So we have Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who. The greatest sci-fi stories of their time. You can see the influences of Star Wars and Star Trek in nearly every science fiction story made afterward (and there’s a lot of fantasy which can trace its way back to Star Wars, although one of these days I’ll need to come up with a Star Trek-inspired fantasy setting).

But Doctor Who?

Nothing. At least in comparison.

Story Notes: Why We Fight

Notes to: Why We Fight

This was, I think, the first story I ever wrote that I was totally satisfied with. There's still a lot of room for improvement, but even so I like it to this day.

Idea: Cosmic force of Frozen Time and People Getting Eaten

In a previous Idea post we learned about the Green. Today we learn about its cosmic counterpart, the Red.

Where the Green exists in the time between seconds, and in the dead past, the Red exists where time goes wrong somehow; it is either the disease which causes the symptoms, or the cancer with an underlying cause. Whether the Red came because time was broken, or time was broken because of the Red, is unclear, and perhaps doesn’t matter. What is clear is this:

The Red is here, and time has curled in on itself.

Clocks refuse to move, or else the lights on them simply blinked out. The sun is always hanging just above the horizon in the east, no matter how long you travel to or away from it, and the process of decay appears to have been halted. Things will weaken and eventually break if put under pressure, but rust and rot are nonexistent, and while stomachs will break down and process food and liquids, such things are not necessary for survival. People don’t age, either, remaining however old they were when this all happened, and while it’s possible that people are still as fertile as they were before time curled, the result of any successful conception still wouldn’t develop even into a blastula, and so the effect— a lack of births— is still the same. Sleep, too, is unnecessary, although, again, possible for those who want it. Nobody dreams anymore, though.

Society probably could have adapted to this, had it had the chance, but within a matter of days the Red made its presence known. It acted, and still acts, through swarms of monsters of every conceivable shape. Each one is incredibly lethal and difficult to kill, and though they are not present in great numbers (perhaps a hundred thousand over the face of the entire world), they are relentless, and you will come across them eventually, no matter where you hide. There were millions of them to begin with and the civilization of the past was able to destroy most of these before it fell, but in the end fall it did. The few people still alive generally lead nomadic existences, no longer being bound by needs for such things as food. They may look for others or save books, but even the hunters must be wary of the monsters that in turn are hunting them. Each and every loss, on either side, is a loss that can never be restored unless the situation changes drastically, and it can take so many people to kill a single monster...

Idea: Vampires, the Neil Armstrongs of Time

Time travel is utterly fatal. If you travel back in time, even by a second, you will die. No special effects. No horrifying bodily trauma. No marks, no mess. Just dead.

Now, this was wonderful for the weapons industry, but not so great for the "going back in time and seeing the past" crowd. The best that you can do is set up some probes and then call them back, but time travel messes up electronics something bad. You won't always get clean recordings, and you won't even always get your recorder back. You can always let your recorder take the slow way back to your time in order to avoid giving it a nice wash in the timestream twice, but the longer it'll take to reach you the more time it'll have to be destroyed in some other, more mundane, manner.

Thankfully, there's a wonderful solution. Vampires are totally dead, contrary to every scientific law which would like to have a word with them about animated corpses that sustain themselves on blood. And while nobody was expecting them to actually exist, it wasn't two minutes before the secret was out before some crazy scientist said what all of the other crazy scientists were thinking. "Let's send them back in time."

It wasn't as simple as grabbing vampires off of the street and throwing them into the past. There had never been very many, and there were even fewer now. An even bigger problem was that you couldn't trust them. As soon as a few had been collected, though, a solution to both problems was easy to fashion. The crazy scientists recruited crazier personnel, trained them for the missions that they would shortly undertake, and turned them into vampires.

Of course, how did vampires come to exist in the first place? They should be impossible. And to lesser beings, they are. Or were. And would be. But time travel makes temporal tense a tricky thing. Billions of years from now, the universe will be coming to a close. Our descendants will have scratched the ceiling of possibility and uncovered every secret. They were content, because it would have been useless to be otherwise. But they were not going to leave the doable undone. And though it was still impossible to travel through time and live to tell the tale, it was slightly less impossible to create something that could act, think, persist, and yet be dead.

It's funny what the universe will let you get away with, in the end. Our descendants created vampires, and they sent the first vampires back to the dawn of history. Not to do anything that would be considered spectacular in any other circumstances. Just exist, and keep existing, and bring more people in as necessary to keep it going. But history was rewritten by that simple, continuous act. Not that our one-time descendants minded. They had done all that they could. Their history was full. But by granting this gift to their dim and distant ancestors, they could create a history fresher and more full than their own, a history with billions of years of time travel against a universe of light, not huddled around the last remaining, manufactured stars, waiting for the darkness to come in.

Idea: Dimension-Traveling Fairy Warlords

The Fair Folk are a conquering people and have been for the many trillions of years that they have existed. They roam from world to world, sometimes exploiting the holes between universes (or even burrowing new ones). As factional conflicts break out the losing side departs for new grounds, and eventually even the winners leave for newer shores, abandoning a wasted world. They are in their third generation as they count it, each generation coming into its time only when all the members of the previous generation have died (which happens only through violence or, very rarely, illness). Whether they developed naturally or were created by others they have not revealed, and their civilization began in a tribal hunter-gatherer state that has changed little, adapting only as necessary to the demands of an empire that stretches across the world.

The Fair Folk appear to be attractive, androgynous members of whatever species the observer belongs to, looking slightly closer to whichever gender the observer feels most comfortable with. Each one looks the same as the next one but as the observer spends more time with particular Fair Folk they begin to acquire, to the observer, slight details that set them apart from the others.

They are able to interbreed with anything living, even plants, and these hybrid children are monstrously hideous. Not because they are more inhuman but because they are less so— their parents are so far beyond the bounds of what our minds can accept that we replace the sight with something else, but the hybrids are close enough that we can see them as they are. Hybrids, unlike their alien parents, do succumb to age, but even so they often live for hundreds of thousands of years.

Because the Fair Folk can only reproduce among themselves every few centuries (they can be considered hermaphrodites but only in our understanding, and really included many other sexes that only manifest in species of other universes, and eight Fair Folk are necessary for reproduction) but can reproduce with others every decade or so, they are quickly outnumbered by their hybrid spawn, which by the time that the world begins to get used up have greatly replaced the previous ecosystem (the Fair Folk aren't exactly picky).

• What if a world already controlled by one group of the Fair Folk is invaded by another faction that is leaving either a lost war or a territory with depleted resources?
• What would a single member of the Fair Folk do if it found itself separated from its peers on another world? Slow takeover? Seclusion? Try to summon its kin?

Genre Splash #4: Pokebots [B]

Continued from Wednesday.

Where people haven't found a way to defend against the machines, civilization has crumbled long ago. Surviving countries have stumbled upon a number of countermeasures: many machines have aquatic capabilities but none of them like salt water, which impairs their senses; many, especially older designs, are vulnerable to EMP. The most effective, however, is using other machines. Techniques exist for modifying their programming in order to turn them to human use. Even with modern improvements the process is far from perfect, though, and machines can go rogue if precautions aren't taken. One of the most important factors to keep in mind is that the programming changes can be fought, and most precautions center on ensuring that the machine doesn't want to escape (a steady diet of its owner's blood is extremely helpful). Machines will even fight attempts to undo these changes if the change was done right.

Genre Splash #4: Pokebots [A]

Challenge: Alternate History: World War II/Pet Monster

The year is 1978. The American Initiative patrols the Panama Quarantine Line. From behind the Rocky Mountains, Remnant Columbia prepares to take back the rest of the continent and save the Holdout States. The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere is showing its first signs of decay while the British are just beginning to pull themselves back together. It is 1978, and it has been thirty-seven years since the machines came.

The New War started in Europe. Nobody knows if they're a German experiment gone rampant or if the Nazis were just unlucky. The first machines were clunky and inefficient. Very simple, and relatively easy to destroy. They've been getting better. They adapt, changing form and function in response to experience and often demonstrating the ability to shift between different modes- machines of the artiglieria-variety are normally small, speedy things with little firepower but they can convert into a static form, rooted into the ground for support, which can blow holes through concrete walls.