Worldbuilding Wednesday: Drug-free Dystopia

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. 

In an inversion of a popular type of dystopia, the masses are not kept on drugs. In fact, it is only the rulers that are even permitted to do drugs. Everything else will follow from this.

Why this peculiar policy? Let's take a page from the Rastafari, among others, and say that the issue is about the power of drugs to open and enlighten the mind. The rulers are concerned with their, ahem, creative power and their ability to broaden the mind.

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. 

Worldbuilding Wednesday: Tiger-souled humans and mad scientist werewolves

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. 

The initial idea that I'm building this from is that our protagonist is a human with the soul of a jaguar... No, let's make that a tiger. That feels better. Yeah. I don't do enough with tigers lately.

So, human with a soul of a tiger. Shapeshifting is possibly, but it is really painful and against the natural order. Of course, having a mismatched soul like this is also against the natural order, but when you break one thing it's easier to break another.

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.

Worldbuilding Wednesday: Alien Gods

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.

If our beliefs produced gods, then do alien species have gods? This is a sort of Far Future Scion or American Gods kind of story, I suppose. It's about taking a not-uncommon premise from contemporary fantasy and melding it with science fiction.

So, let's do this.