tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81889426567572311732024-03-05T13:21:02.589-08:00White Marble BlockCallmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.comBlogger144125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-69116305328441182182016-03-03T00:05:00.000-08:002016-05-25T16:55:44.129-07:00The Hope Spot #16 "Deconstructing the Cold Equations"<div style="text-align: justify;">
Last month we began to take a look
at two developing genres called “rational fiction” and “rationalist fiction” in
order to see what they might be able to lend to horror. This month we will
continue by taking apart a story that has been both lauded and maligned, in
order to teach by example. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<o:p></o:p>
The core element of both rational
and rationalist fiction is that “the rules of the fictional world are sane and
consistent.” Some stories fail on both of these counts. Others manage to be
consistent, but are far from sane. The following story is science fiction, not
horror, but the lesson can be applied to any genre. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<o:p></o:p>
<i>The Cold Equations</i> was
written in 1954 by the author Tom Godwin. In brief, the story is about an
emergency vessel that is being sent to deliver badly-needed medicine to a
colony planet. The pilot discovers that there is a stowaway, which is an issue
because the amount of fuel on the ship is carefully-calibrated and any
additional weight will mean that the ship will not be able to land safely.
Alas, the stowaway is a teenage girl who did not know this and merely wanted to
visit her brother. Still, the laws of physics are the laws of physics, and
since either the pilot or the girl must go, and the pilot is the only one who
can land the ship, the girl must be thrown out lickety-split. “It has to be
that way,” the protagonist says,” and no human in the universe can change it.” </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<o:p></o:p>
The story could make a good example
of “paleo” rationalist fiction if it weren’t for a few problems—or rather the
same problem, repeated over and over. As Gary Westfahl summed up: “Very poor
Engineering.” On TV Tropes, the Headscratchers article for <i>The Cold
Equations</i> is more than half the length of the ten thousand-word story
itself. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<o:p></o:p>
There is a puzzle, of sorts, in
this story: How does one make sure that the medicine gets to the colony, so
that nobody dies from kala fever? The solution, Tom Godwin asserts, is that the
girl has to go. But there is a chair. There is a supply cabinet with, one might
reasonably suppose, supplies. There are clothes, “identification disks”, a gun,
paper, pencils, and other miscellany. The girl weighs about a hundred pounds;
is there really no way to get rid of that relatively small amount of weight? An
“answer story” called <i>The Cold Solution</i> sees the pilot going so far as
to lop off some limbs. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<o:p></o:p>
Let us assume, however, that there
is not enough miscellany to toss out, that the chair cannot be removed, that
lost limbs will put the pilot in shock so that he cannot do his job as a pilot,
and so on. A puzzle that sought to portray a good person who was honestly
trying every possible alternative—as the story clearly meant to do—should at
least have its protagonist consider these possibilities, even if they became
unfeasible. By skipping over these possibilities the story betrays that things
are happening “solely because ‘the plot requires it’”, which rational fiction
is rather opposed to. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<o:p></o:p>
Even so, the story still fails on
the aforementioned count of the fictional world being “sane and consistent.”
They are consistent, certainly, but are they sane? Absolutely not. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<o:p></o:p>
If stowaways pose such a danger,
then the girl should not be able to say, “I just sort of walked in when no one
was looking my way… I slipped into the closet there after the ship was ready to
go just before you came in.” Something as simple as a locked door would have
nipped this plot before it even started. Or a sensor that alerted the pilot to
weight and “some kind of a body that radiated heat” before liftoff, instead of
an hour later. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<o:p></o:p>
Most radical of all, perhaps the
society that designed these ships could rediscover a concept called “safety
margins” and actually adhere to them. This is a principle that is basic to all
engineering. Yes, the story breaks down completely and you have no plot at all,
if there was a little more fuel on the ship. But while the rules of the story
may be consistent, they apparently correspond to a greater world that is
utterly insane. As Cory Doctorow says, the ideas in this story “present a kind
of blueprint for disaster, a willful and destructive blindness…” </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<o:p></o:p>
As the story’s existence goes to
show you, it is possible to write a tale whose logic goes out the window as
soon as you start asking what sort of world it exists in. Indeed, since the
editor sent it back three times because he disliked Tom Godwin’s “ingenious
ways to save the girl” you can even learn that there are some people who will
not accept a story that demands to exist in a reasonable world. Nevertheless,
as can be demonstrated just as easily by the story’s reception (especially in
present times), you still can’t make a story like that and have it be <i>good</i>. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<o:p></o:p>
There is a glut of horror fiction featuring
characters whose actions do not make sense, and who do not inhabit a world that
makes internal sense. This is different from saying that a story about
time-traveling robots doesn’t make sense on the basis of our world, which has a
conspicuous lack of time-traveling robots. If there are problems with the
internal logic of <i>The Terminator</i> then it is because, for example, we are
never told why Skynet sent a robot to assassinate a woman in the past before
her son became a threat, when an equally-viable strategy for a time-traveling
AI would have been to simply start the war decades earlier. <o:p></o:p>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Don’t take this to mean that the
film isn’t good. Since we all have different tastes in fiction, and there is
even a market for drugstore romance novels with nearly-indistinguishable plots,
I can’t even say that <i>The Terminator </i>would have been an
objectively-better film for somehow resolving this issue. All that I can say is
that neither <i>The Terminator </i>nor <i>The Cold Equations </i>can be
considered rational fiction, let alone rationalist.
</div>
<br />
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Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-47740475666570297632016-02-04T00:01:00.000-08:002016-02-04T00:01:10.169-08:00The Hope Spot #14 Lovecraft and Existentialism<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I cannot leave Yog-Sothothery
alone. It calls to me. It demands a response. But my response is not an
affirmation of its statement. It can’t be. Cthulhu is slumbering in R’lyeh,
waiting to arise from sleep and death. Nyarlathotep dances to the tune of a
million flutes. Indeed, it may be claimed with certainty that in the epilogue
it shall be said of our world that darkness, decay, and the red death held
dominion over all, and of the coleopteran race to follow ours that this, too,
shall pass. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But I am crippled from properly
appreciating this, I think. I am an existentialist, and in my existentialism I
look out my window and behold the passing away of all that I love and the
imminent reign of the Great Old Ones, and yet… and yet still I ask myself
whether I shall have my eggs fried or scrambled this morning. In my
existentialism, I cannot escape the matter of life, even if it will one day
come crashing down to nothing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Mythos demands a response,
and so I say this: that the presence of these things, standing at either end of
our lives like terrible wraiths, does not invalidate the moments between. If
men could survive the concentration camps and speak, as did Viktor Frankl, of
“the last of the human freedoms,” the ability to choose how oneself will react
within the limits of one’s effective agency—then the war is over and was only
ever a lie to begin with. It is no matter if Nyarlathotep stands outside,
doorknob turning in his grip. The question still remains: How will you act in
this very minute, no matter how few or many lie before or after it? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In other words, Azathoth is. This
is not to be disputed. But no matter the fact of his existence, as terrible as
it is, there still remains the matter of life: what you are going to do with
whatever amount of days and minutes you have left to you. After the world ends
it may be that as much will have come of helping your neighbor as would have
come from sitting on the floor for the lights to cut out, but it nevertheless
feels as though they are not equal in the moment that they happen. Rejecting
any choice at all, simply because one day it will amount to nothing, is a
special kind of cowardice. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Existence precedes essence,”
said Sartre. Cthulhu is waiting in R’lyeh, hungering for your soul, but that
does not prevent you from choosing how you react. You may die in the fetal
position or with your head held high, and if that is the only choice that can
be made then it is all the more important for you to choose well. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">With a philosophy of life that is
founded upon existentialism, I cannot view Yog-Sothothery as anything but an
elaborate and terribly entrancing form of the Absurd. It is for this reason that
I find myself drawn again and again to Lovecraft’s Mythos in both my reading
and my writing. All of my work in Lovecraft’s playground is based upon
approaching it, not nihilistically, but existentially. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Any human who comes in contact
with the Mythos must decide zir stance on suicide, and any human who decides
that ze is against it must answer the question posed by Viktor Frankl: “Why
have you not committed suicide?” If one has not killed oneself then there is a
reason for this, whether great or pathetic, and it is in the space of these two
moments that my stories play out.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.</span>Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-3265686178741779672015-12-24T00:10:00.000-08:002015-12-24T00:10:00.324-08:00The Idea Emporium #10 A Norse Mythos [3/3]<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Of the Elder Ones, who died that men might live, we have
spoken. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Of Innan, which watches all and moves through all, we
have spoken. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Of the devourers, which are bound and will be unbound, we
have spoken. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
And yet there are others, of we have not spoken. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b>Those Which Steal the Dead</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In death we become food twice-over. The maggots of the
corpse, the dwarfs, grow out of our spiritual corpses and feed further. These
are the mi-go. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Or so it is said. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is not that they feed upon the dead, but that they steal
away the dead for their purposes. The dead are refitted, born anew as meat-machines
to do the will of their re-animators. Through the dead, their puppets, the
mi-go act. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The mi-go do not hail from this space. They do not come from
this world, nor from any other star which could be reached in this universe.
The light of this space is poison to them, and its radiation sows disease in
them. In the brightness of the moon they are blinded and made lethargic.
Beneath the glory of the sun they fall and cannot move, and die in hours. And
even the starlight gnaws at them by inches. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Their artificial skins are clumsy things, not fit for the
work which they desire to do in the bowels of the Earth. So they reside in
shielded chambers in the hills and on other worlds, and from these places
direct their puppet-dead to do their work. The dead are sustained by elixirs
drawn out of the body of Yig who is bound beneath the sea, and this is why they
have come to this world to do their work. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Here is truth: The mi-go do not waste their tools. The body
is one thing, and the mind another. But of what they do to the minds of the
dead there is nothing which should be spoken. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The mi-go make pilgrimages to the cities of Hastur and
Shub-Niggurath, but these are not their cities. They dwell in labyrinthine
complexes of mines and forges far beneath these places, close to the planet’s
core. They hear the whisperings of Azathoth who is bound beneath the mountains,
and the words of Nyarlathotep who is his master’s will, and they make parley
with these powers. Their dealings with such beings have made them wise beyond
comparison; the price which they have paid for this is not known. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b>Their Majesties of Colour</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
There are things which learned men call Colours. These
things come from the place between the stars, and to them they always return,
but in the time between they sit in the midst of life and suck it up. Not even
Innan knows why it is that they do this, whether it is that their spawning is
the purpose or only a byproduct of the process. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
But as they sit and sup at the world, they pose the risk
of leaving contamination behind them. There are times when this contamination
weakens, decays, and is no more. Just as often, these fragments find a place in
the life around them, trading predation for parasitism. But they often die,
parasite and host together, and it is only very rarely that stability is
attained. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
In the books of Innan they are called the Ielb. To many
sorcerers, they are called ylves, or elves, or aelfen. They are those in whom
the Colours have adopted a totally new mode of existence, and even of
reproduction. They are beings of sickness and madness, leaving the seeds of
death with a touch and driven to madness by the pain and the rotting of their
minds. Without the Colours, they would surely die. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
They seek to spread. They do so through their children,
calling for wives and husbands from among their followers, those who would call
upon them for the sake of their powers. The pollution of the Colour continues
in their line, weakened but still present. These ones are totally mad, for they
have never known anything but the fragments of Colour which are in their
bodies. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
When one of the Ielb has grown very old, too old for its
Colours to sustain it, the death of old age finally comes. When this happens
its Colours are still unable to return to the stars, but sits and infests the
corpse. The followers of the Ielb take the Colours and divide them, and eat,
taking this sacrament into themselves so that their own lives may be extended. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>The Wild Hunt</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Some say that they are dwarfs as well, or black elves. It is
said that they are servants of Innan, or worshipers of Cthulhu. Perhaps they
are all these things. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
They are feasters on the dead, vulture carrion kings. They
scour the world as the mi-go do, but the thoughts which they steal away are
destined to serve a less unspeakable purpose: the recovered minds of the dead
are a mead of inspiration for the Wild Hunt. The thoughts of the dead are
consumed to expand their knowledge and in some unknown manner preserve their
bodies. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The chief of the Wild Hunt is one-eyed Onsdag, the child of
Ve. Onsdag’s body was left to rot away beneath the ocean’s surface a million
years ago. It is the creature’s mind which now survives, and because of the
secret of this technique it is Onsdag alone of all the Wild Hunt whose body has
no need for the minds of the dead. Onsdag leads them onward for—entertainment?
to build an army? to simply do what is necessary to survive from day to day? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
One day, the sun will grow cold. The keening of the mi-go
will spill out across the face of all the world and Azathoth and his Children
will be unbound. And the Wild Hunt will stand against the hosts of Azathoth,
until Onsdag is devoured by Cthulhu, and rest have been felled by Yig who
taught his secrets to Onsdag and was betrayed.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-69904856928423318062015-11-19T17:30:00.000-08:002015-11-19T17:30:01.643-08:00The Idea Emporium #9 A Norse Mythos [2/3]<div class="MsoNormal">
By the works of the Elder Ones, who
were before and will be after, were the devourers created. From the ichor and
the being of the Elder Ones were the devourers created, and so it is that they
are cousins to the Elder Ones. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And it came to pass after their
creation that the devourers grew in number, and came to war with the Elder Ones
many times. And they were cast down, time and again, till one of their number,
whose name was Azathoth, came and made parley and blood-truce with the Elder
Ones. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But then Azathoth was cast down and
imprisoned in the core of the Earth, where the heat was too great for him to
bear and it sickened him like the most potent venom. And the children of
Azathoth were bound likewise. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And none know the reason for their
binding, whether they were taken in by treason or were betrayers themselves.
But the Elder Ones claim their story, and the devourers their own, and if any
know the truth then it is Innan— but Innan reveals nothing, and who can say but
that the treacherous act was wrought by the very same? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Azathoth and Nyarlathotep,
who together are the Father of Them All</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Bound in the depths of the Earth is
Azathoth, the uncrowned king who lays across a tablet of stone, runes inscribed
upon it in the devourer’s blood, and runes cut in its flesh by the tablet’s
shards. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is well known to certain cults
that the mind, though it be born of the flesh of the body, may divorce itself
from the same and be projected into the world. Most may only project the
sensation of themselves, sight and sound and, among the powerful, the feeling
of their projection. And even so, many can only be perceived but dimly by the
unlearned, and few there are who can work their own will without possessing a
body of flesh and bones. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is called the filgya, according
to the speech of Innan, whose own powers rely on a technological refinement of
this principle. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Azathoth is one that is counted
among the most powerful of projectors. The body of Azathoth lays bound, and
even so it projects itself in the manner of a witch. This filgya is no mere
extension of awareness and being, but may take physical form, and the name of
it is Nyarlathotep. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Nyarlathotep goes to and fro across
the face of the world, doing the will of its master, who is itself. It is
thought by many that Azathoth will not be unbound by Nyarlathotep’s
machinations, but there is much power to be had under the heavens, and who is
to say that Nyarlathotep may not devise a way to make the sun grow cold before
its time? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is thought that, according to the
records of Innan, humans will survive for many millions of years, but on this
matter Innan is not specific. All that is said is that humans will survive to
the end of the days of the Earth, but as for the manner of the sun’s dying, whether
its aging be hastened or not, this has not been given to us. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Cthulhu, who is the First
Child</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cthulhu! who dwells bound in the
depths of the sea. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cthulhu! who is like a three-faced
wolf, with as many limbs as he has teeth. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Cthulhu! who is male and female
both, and mother and father to its twin children. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
To hear the sorcerers, Cthulhu is
the moon and Cthulhu is stone. Or perhaps it is only as still as stone, beneath
the waves where its brother is likewise imprisoned. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This was the manner in which it was
bound: The mi-go were sought to create a prison fit for the devourer, and
chains with which to bind its body and bind its mind. And then it was lured
therein, with a thousand Elder Ones, whose minds were fit prey and bait for the
devourer. Cthulhu consumed them, or consumed their thinking-selves, leaving
only thoughtless bodies, and when it turned to depart the trap had already been
sprung and it was sealed away. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But the children of Cthulhu were not
bound. They escaped, and bred, and their children bred among themselves
likewise, and they also took wives and husbands from the children of men, so as
to keep their gene-lines pure from the slow rot of inbreeding. And these and
their servants look forward to the day when they shall free their distant
parent, and with it dance and rejoice and devour. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If it should be that Nyarlathotep
shall bring the sun near to its grave before its time, then surely it is the
children of Cthulhu that shall aid it in so doing. And then Cthulhu will be
unbound, and at the last it will take the sun between its jaws, and then night
will come forever to the Earth. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Yig, who is the Second
Child</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yig! who is called Father
Sea-thread. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yig! who is sustained by his dying!<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yig! who calls to the doctors of
lives eternal, speaking in their sleep. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is not the only name by which
Yig is known, for he was also called Bastet and Sekhmet in ancient Egypt, and
Apep and Setesh. And he was worshiped as N’chushtan by the prophet-judge Thutmasha,
who murdered a man in Egypt, and as the North Tezcatlipoca by the Aztecs. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It is Yig alone of all his family
who was slain by the Elder Ones, and yet in his death he yet persists. There
are ways of existing beyond death, and these secrets were perceived by him.
Though he lays unmoving in the depths, bound lest he take up his body yet
again, the projection of his mind still flits like a haunting ghost through the
cities of the world, and speaks to those that are susceptible to his voice. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
His wounds are too great to for life
to be sustained in his body were he to return to it, and the chains too strong
for him to be free were he to live again. But the doctors of lives eternal, who
act in his name and according to his counsel— these will surely work out his
resurrection and his return. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And till this time he is succeeded
by his nine daughters. The names of all of them have not been given unto us,
but only three: The Pitching One, That One Through Which One Can See the
Heavens, and Bloody-Hair. The names of the others, and even whether they still
live, are not given to us. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Shub-Niggurath and Hastur,
who are the Third Child</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Shub-Niggurath! who is the Hidden
King. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Hastur! who is the dweller-below. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Shub-Niggurath! Hastur! which are the
two-in-one whose true name is not to be named. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Beneath the surface of the poles,
between the heat of the Earth’s core and the heat of summer upon the surface,
are the cities of the Cold Ones, which are called the Abode of Mists, and their
names are Keylo and Relex. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
These cities were before Irem, the
first city of men, but now there is only lifelessness, where the Cold Ones and
their children sit in deathly hibernation. Their servants descend only
occasionally, in the deepest winters, in order to hear the will of their
dying-undying masters, to pass into the way of the cult and carry out the will
of them that wait below. The walls of the two cities are in grievous disrepair
and whole passages are blocked off now, their supports crumbled and collapsed. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There is darkness and mist here, and
the whispers of the Hidden King. There are rivers here, or waters that flow
through the decaying pipes, and in the waters are the many sicknesses which the
Cold Ones bred in their war against the Elder Ones, and which might serve them
again. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Surely they are all bound,
Azathoth-Nyarlathotep and their children. Surely they will be unbound.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Creative Commons License" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a><br />
This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-82117386252234728412015-10-15T00:09:00.000-07:002015-10-15T00:09:00.777-07:00The Idea Emporium #8: A Norse Mythos [1/3]<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
This month and the next two we’re going to making some
changes to Lovecraft’s Mythos, taking inspiration from Norse mythology. We’re
going to play fast and loose here, just warning you. Going back and forth
between Lovecraft and the Norse until eventually we take a flying leap away
from both. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
As always, this is free for the taking. Use it in a book
or a short story. Grab half of it, twist it around like it did to Lovecraft,
and then smoosh it in with another pack of ideas. It’s all fine. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b>Fallen Giants and Oceans of Blood</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Many billions of years ago the Earth was with form, but
as yet was lifeless, for there was “naught but a yawning gap, and grass
nowhere.” Then came the Elder Ones, which call themselves the Ymacyo. They were
explorers, not colonists. They subsisted on the produce of the authumla tanks,
which recycled their waste, and there abided for many years. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
And then it came to pass that one of them, whose name was
Yima, was betrayed and slain by its friend, Ve. Its corpse was disposed of,
never to be found, and the rest of the Elder Ones departed soon thereafter, fearful
that they had come into some kind of curse. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Their descendants would not visit again for a long time. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
All this is according to what is written in the libraries
of Innan, whose recorders and curators are from before the world was, and from
after it will was. And thus it was, according to the will of one that was
nameless, who was in the body of Ve. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b>The Cord-men of Innan</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Inann is not, but was and will be. For it does not abide <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
They have been called the Great Race of Yith and, thus, Yithians,
but that is the name of their homeworld. Their people do not call themselves
Yith, any more than humans call themselves Earth or Earthers, but Innan. It
means something like “blessed” or “exalted,” but with a tense that implies an
ongoing and yet-to-be-completed process, rather than something that has
occurred in the past. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
There is no difference in their tongue between the bodies
of the people and their culture. For a species that propagates by transferring
some of its minds to a set of entirely alien bodies, they are unconcerned with
molecules. Innan are Innan because they have the culture and learning of Innan.
And if we are to refer to them at a specific point in time, or their political
territory, we would do well to call it Innan-guard. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
It was one of
Innan, whose mind had been projected years in the past into Ve’s body, that slew
Yima. Innan did not originate from Earth, but they abode there for a time, both
before and after humankind, and they arranged the death of Yima so that its
corpse would provide the raw materials from which life might spring forth in
the oceans of that world. And this was so, that Innan might have bodies in
which to abide for a time. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b>Magic</b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
“Magic” is a word that refers to many things. Magicians
work with principles, according to their knowledge, and this is all that magic
is, the production of the miraculous through mundane means that are
nevertheless unknown to most. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
To some it is the pipe-playing which calls heralds of
Nyarlathotep. To others it is the use of old technology from before the rise of
humankind. Some are binders, who must know the desires of the bound to have
success. But to most, it is a writing. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
There is no human alive that can translate the words of
Innan. Some glyphs were handed down to us by Innan, or by older races that had
been given them, and others were stolen away, remembered by those who had been
taken to Innan-guard itself and had seen its libraries. But it is known what
may happen when a certain glyph is marked down. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
When you write a message to a time traveler, it doesn’t
need to get the message right away. Probably, your message will be received,
and though it be in thousands or millions of years, Innan will be able to act
on it all the same. While we do not know exactly what a glyph means, we may
have a rough idea of what is being requested. And sometimes, if it fits with
the unknown agenda of Innan, the glyph will be answered. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Some write the glyphs in ink or carve them into stone.
More valuable, though, is the knowledge of the glyphs as thread. Before Innan
departed from Yith, they were blind, and their records were made in the form of
threads, not unlike quipu. Although Innan are wholly incapable of using the
system when they are in certain bodies, they treasure it throughout all times
and are more willing to answer the calls of those that also know it. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
This is the name of the glyph by which magicians identify
themselves: Kunna. It means “to know by heart” and “to have insight in the
knowledge that has passed away.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<b>Ragnarok</b><br /><div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
This is the end of the Earth and all that inhabit it. It
is when the sun grows cold, and the surface of the Earth becomes tolerable once
more for the Cold Ones that have inhabit the frozen places in the depths of the
sea and deeper still. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
Azathoth will be loosed, and his herald will go out
before him. Cthulhu will be loosed from his chains. Yig will uncoil himself and
breach the surface of the waves. Hastur and Shub-Niggurath will ascend from the
buried halls of Kelyo, which is before Irem. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
The outposts of Innan which abide at that time will be
driven out, and the records kept there destroyed, to be remade at other points
in time and space. The remnant of the Elder Ones will be destroyed and all
their children with them, by their cousins and their thralls, and the world
which was life-filled by Yima’s spilt blood will be made clean and barren once
more. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
And it will come to pass that in the waste will dance the
myriad children of the Cold Ones, until these too pass away, and go out to
other worlds. And in the emptiness of the waste there will be left only one
being, who is neither Azathoth nor Nyarlathotep, and neither their children or
their chosen. And its name is not given to be known even unto Innan, and for
this cause it is known simply as The One, who is alone, and reigns alone, and
will be alone from eternity to eternity. <o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
This is the end and the way of the world. Foretelling is
merely recalling according to the memories of those who have gone further down
the river of time, and then returned. Thus, let it be remembered, for it is
written even as it happened, as observed by Innan which was present and beheld
it all.</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Creative Commons License" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a><br />
This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-40072357626118415712015-09-10T17:30:00.000-07:002015-09-10T17:30:01.139-07:00Things That I Like: Cosmogonical Fiction<div class="MsoNormal">
<b>Things That I Like:
Cosmogonical Fiction<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What’s that, you may ask? Let’s start out with a few examples. Spoilers
will be everywhere, so be warned. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Unknown
Armies</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Nexus War</i> and its
replacement <i>Nexus Clash</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Homestuck</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<a href="http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/quietwar.htm"><i>A Dry, Quiet War</i></a><span style="color: #222222; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> 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 <i>this</i> 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.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<b><span style="color: #222222; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">What do these have in common? <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">There is a
conflict being fought by persons or groups. They may be fighting each other, as
in <i>Unknown Armies </i>and <i>Nexus </i>War, or against the environment or
another group which has no chance of influencing the universe, as in <i>Homestuck</i>, where the Dersites can only
prevent the creation of the new universe, not twist it to their own aims. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222;">The conflict
generally involves an amount of violence, but violence typically isn’t the only factor. </span><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">In </span><i style="color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">Unknown Armies</i><span style="color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;"> you have to act in a way that
befits your Archetype, and acting against this can actually reduce your power.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">In </span><i style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">Homestuck</i><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">, catching frogs is one of most
important tasks out there, and building houses is also a pretty big thing.</span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">As mentioned
before, in the </span><i style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">Nexus</i><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;"> games something
as simple as repairing or building a door can help out your side.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222;">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:</span><br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">Characters in
</span><i style="color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">Unknown Armies</i><span style="color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;"> gain godlike powers.</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">In </span><i style="color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">Homestuck</i><span style="color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">, Sburb’s players have the
potential to ascend to the “god tiers” and get other abilities along the way,</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">The champions
of the Elder Powers in the </span><i style="color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">Nexus </i><span style="color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">games
can become angels, demons, vampires, and more.</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #222222; text-indent: -0.25in;">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.</span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">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 <i>go</i>.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">These stories
are to be distinguished from games like <i>Mage</i>
or <i>Esoterrorists</i>, or stories like
Fritz Leiber’s <i>Change War</i> series
because the nature of this reality is set in stone. Even if you’re fighting for
this universe’s nature, as in <i>A</i> <i>Dry, Quiet War</i>, 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 <i>you</i> but to everybody else in the
timeline-as-it-should-have-happened it’s as if nothing different went down (as
in <i>Homestuck</i> but also as in </span><a href="ftp://82.1.244.36/shares/USB_Storage/Media/Books/Non-Medical/Alfred%20Bester/Alfred%20Bester%20-%20The%20Men%20Who%20Murdered%20Mohammed.pdf"><i>The Men Who Murdered
Mohammed</i></a><span style="color: #222222; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<b><span style="color: #222222; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">What’s the point of writing all this
out? <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">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 <i>give</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">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? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<span style="color: #222222; mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: JA; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">(And does
anyone think that it’s an interesting enough pattern to use for a story, or am
I the only one?)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white;">
<br /></div>
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Creative Commons License" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a><br />
This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.</div>
Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-73545612391914840202015-08-13T17:30:00.000-07:002015-08-27T23:44:58.135-07:00Things That I Like: A Few More Magic Systems for the Taking<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
<strong style="color: black;"> </strong>We return this week with, well, a few more magic systems. And to round them out, here’s a link to an old story of mine, which is as much overview of a magic system as it is creation myth: <a data-mce-href="http://whitemarbleblock.blogspot.com/2014/05/fiction-legend-of-creation.html?q=legend" href="http://whitemarbleblock.blogspot.com/2014/05/fiction-legend-of-creation.html?q=legend" style="color: #743399;">A Legend of Creation</a>.</div>
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<li><strong style="color: black;">The Multitudinous Way</strong></li>
</ol>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
The financial astrologers are not the only power in their world. In some opposition to them (not so much morally but ideologically, for their respective magics depend on wildly variant world-views) are those that consider themselves Icewalkers, or Driven, or Joktanists, or the followers of Ishmael’s Way, or nomad-princes.<br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
There are three tools through which a Joktanist wields zir magic: wine, bowl, and dust. No cup will do to hold the wine, which may be of any quality, nor a deep plate, but only a bowl. The dust is tossed in (the more you put in, the more you get out) to fuel the spell, and once the bowl is struck or swirled to achieve movement the dust dissolves and the spell takes effect through the medium of the wine.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
What exactly is done depends upon what kind of dust is used. Salt, for example, will imbue the wine with protective properties. It shields against harm such that, if placed on the doors of a house, it will make the building impregnable for a time. Ash-charged wine will ignite. Common earth will heal or repair.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Just as the financial astrologers lose something in return for their powers, though, so too do the Driven. Each of the nomad-princes has become what ze is because ze wanted freedom and wonder. In a dream ze pursued zir quarry— deer, man, RC car, or something else entirely— until it was caught and revealed itself to be the Dream of Kings (no accidental switching of order there) and granted zem power. As consequence, however, the Joktanists can never rest their heads in the same place more than once. No bed, cot, or sleeping bag can serve the same man again, nor building, lest the offender suffer nightmares all through zir sleep, and when ze stays in the same city for a full lunar month zir powers— but not the required nomadism— are lost until ze moves again.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Generally, financial astrologers want bigger cities and Icewalkers want smaller ones. Larger cities lend themselves to easier manipulation through ley lines, while smaller cities make things more flexible for the Icewalkers. Nevertheless, it is not unheard of for a financial astrologer to hire an Icewalker for some task.</div>
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<li><strong style="color: black;">Stars and Sun</strong></li>
</ol>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
There are those who have sought out the power of the stars and made bargains with them upon the mountain-tops. To each of them a star comes. They speak, and deal one with another, and make their contract. To one that has made a stellar-pact there is given a small power. Through one star may be granted the power to relieve exhaustion, through another the power to turn steel back to untreated iron, and through a third the power to speak with mice. The number of powers and stellar-pacts to be had is as great as the stars themselves, for no star will refuse to come down and deal with the children of men.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
But there is one cost that is ever the same, no matter the terms of the pact. The usage of this magic hollows out memories, emotions, and other aspects of the mind, leaving space for them to be infested with parasites of a spiritual nature. These parasites, perhaps proto-stars, are not malevolent, but neither are they benign; by natural consequence of their presence they warp their habitation, altering the mind of their host in ways that are small at first but grow greater in the course of time.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
The sun, chief emperor among the stars, does not take part in these pacts, and neither have the stars ever been permitted to remain in the land except for the space of a few minutes. But there are those whose blood goes back to those times when the sun itself came down and tarried long, making merry with the sons of men, and the daughters of men. It bore children to the sons of men, and begot children by the daughters of men, and some of these lines have continued true to this day.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
The power of these bloodlines is tied to the sun, coming with its rise and departing with its setting. Because of the rising and setting of their forebear they have internal clocks precise to a thousandth of a second, being able to tell time by the waxing or waning of their power. When the sun is risen they have not so much great strength as they do the ability to make other things weak, and simply by so choosing they can interact with matter as though it were warm butter, no matter whether it is granite, flesh, or steel. This power is theirs from birth but it does not affect others with the same heritage.</div>
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<li><strong style="color: black;">Morospicy</strong></li>
</ol>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
This magic is as simply as it is horrific: the murder of a human being, under the right conditions, can give the killer a glimpse of another point in time and space. The more removed this point is in either time or space, the more deaths that are required, and changing both has a disproportionate effect. Viewing another location in the present is about as easy as viewing one’s present location in the past, though just a handful of deaths are necessary to glimpse a few minutes of one’s present location ten years hence.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
It is possible, in theory, to glimpse <em style="border: none; color: inherit;">everything</em>, past, present and future. The number of deaths that would be required is unknown, but must surely be immense. It is possible that the population is not even large enough to accommodate make it possible yet. It is just as possible that a group of morospexes are patiently waiting through the centuries for the time when their order may make the necessary sacrifice or, if life extension is possible in the setting, that a single long-lived morospex has been killing through the centuries and saving zir charges in preparation for the day of revelation.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Each morospex has zir own necessary conditions, which can be anything from intoning a certain chant or to using a weapon inscribed with the right runes. These conditions can be discovered either by accident or by the intervention of another morospex using zir own conditions to view the future and see under what conditions someone is practicing morospicy.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
<em style="border: none; color: inherit;">R. </em><em data-mce-style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5;" style="border: none; line-height: 1.5;">Donald James Gauvreau works an assortment of odd jobs, most involving batteries. He has recently finished a guide to comparative mythology for worldbuilders, available <a data-mce-href="http://www.mediafire.com/view/kz4dv41ud9fcbdk/Brother_G's_Cyclopedia_of_Comparative_Mythology.pdf" href="http://www.mediafire.com/view/kz4dv41ud9fcbdk/Brother_G's_Cyclopedia_of_Comparative_Mythology.pdf" style="color: #743399;">here</a>for free. He also maintains a blog at <a data-mce-href="http://whitemarbleblock.blogspot.com/" href="http://whitemarbleblock.blogspot.com/" style="color: #743399;">White Marble Block</a>, where he regularly posts story ideas and free fiction, and writes <a data-mce-href="http://www.rpg.net/columns/list-column.phtml?colname=theculturecolumn" href="http://www.rpg.net/columns/list-column.phtml?colname=theculturecolumn" style="color: #743399;">The Culture Column</a>, an RPG.net column with cultures ready for you to drop into your setting. </em></div>
Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-43808429049852578322015-07-09T17:30:00.000-07:002015-08-27T23:44:53.486-07:00Things That I Like: A Few Systems of Magic for the Taking<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Like everything, these ideas are free for the taking. Consider them to be public domain. Just… grab them, and use them, and stuff. That’s what they’re there for.</div>
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<li><strong style="color: black;">Financial Astrology</strong></li>
</ol>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Developed in the throes of the Great Depression, financial astrology is the art of using magic to make money, and using money to make magic. To those that have sworn the oaths, the signs of the stars unfold to their understanding. They are able to decipher the currents of the future, at least so far as it pertains to currency. The stock market becomes child’s play to them that have sold their eyes and their hearts to the great god Pluto, and the more learned among them can predict its changes to the minute.<br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
What they do next is based upon a principle that everyone knows: Wealth shapes the world. Only the merchant-kings know how true that statement is, however. Currency has an effect on the ley lines of the world, which themselves have subtle effects on the environment when “plucked” by the presence of money. Where a ley line is plucked, and how strongly (that is, how much money is affecting it) determines what happens, so that the right amount in the right place can lead to decreased social stability in another city.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
With the right plucks nearly anything can be done, with the caveat that ley lines influence only living organisms and not natural systems like the weather, and so the financial astrologers carefully manipulate the flow of money to get the changes that they want (which is not to say that others want it— they are not a unified lot). With enough money, ley lines can be plucked so severely that they actually shift in place.</div>
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The one thing about their condition that makes life difficult is that they cannot physically handle money. Credit cards and checks are okay, but actual money catches fire or melts in their hands, leaving them with dross (and burned hands).</div>
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<li><strong style="color: black;">Orthosurgy</strong></li>
</ol>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
A system of magic based upon the principle of sympathy, using teeth and nails as foci. While teeth are reasonably potent and retain their power until destroyed, a single full nail is useful for no more than a couple of weak spells, to say nothing of a mere clipping. They may, however, be used for reanimation, whereas teeth can do nothing to one that has died (including those that have suffered death temporarily), and reanimation is not a terribly powerful spell. Full resurrection may require years of clippings, but to turn a corpse into a shambling walker bound to one’s will for a few weeks requires only a few nails.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
However, whether they be teeth or nails foci must be taken, not given. This is why children leave offerings for the tooth fairy. It robs the leavings of their power by explicitly giving them out to anyone who would be interested in taking them.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
The power of orthosurgy is a gift, however, twisted, and it must be passed on to another in order to persist. Without a declared heir, the death of an orthosurgeost permanently reduces their number by one. Heirs may not be replaced except in the case of premature death, so orthosurgeosts are careful about speaking the “naming words.” Orthosurgeosts become more inhuman as time goes on, first in mind and eventually in body. Among other things they are prone to developing slight kleptomaniacal tendencies, long fingers, and in some cases fingers without nails. Their teeth may change shape and their stomachs change, both in response to whichever diet the orthosurgeost prefers.</div>
<ol start="3" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; margin: 0px 0px 24px 1.5em; padding: 0px;">
<li><strong style="color: black;">Lychery</strong></li>
</ol>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
A kind of ritual magic that makes you the temporary channel for a Power, timeless things from outside existence. The exact ritual sets bounds on the Power and guides its actions toward the desired result: healing, transformation of the body, the unleashing of fire, or whatever other effect is desired.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Lyches know how to use preexisting magical patterns easily enough but experimentation is dangerous. The slightest error can give the Power summoned too much free reign or, if the binding is successful, force it to take an undesired action. Accordingly, innovation is very slow.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Another limitation is tied to candles, which are necessary to strengthen the invoked Power— it might be said that a Power is like a hole of a certain shape which supplies nothing of itself but determines the shape of whatever is put through it. Each candle adds to the potency at hand to make the spell 1.05 times greater than before.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Repeated channeling of Powers affects the body, most principally granting longevity. A lych’s mind is not equipped for this, however, and the weight of memory proves an eventual but inevitable strain. Suicide among very old lyches is common, as senility begins to settle in over the course of centuries. On the bright side, however, senility within the context of a conventional lifespan is far rarer, due to the efforts of lyches to ward off the effects of aging wherever they can, for as long as they can.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
<em style="border: none; color: inherit;">If you want some quick figures: </em>15 candles are necessary to make a spell 2.078 times as powerful as with one candle. 33 to reach 5.003x potency, 50 candles gives it a potency of 11.467x, and 93 candles before the potency overtakes the number of candles at a potency of 93.455x. 100 candles gives a potency of 131.501x and 200 gives a potency of 17,292.58x.</div>
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<li><strong style="color: black;">Greensinging</strong></li>
</ol>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
In the earliest days of Man, he was taught language. The language that was taught him was the language of the world— of life and death, or connection and destruction, of bonds and the severing thereof— and Man’s teachers were the birds. But Man’s first act was to sever the bonds that were between him and the birds, so that they would hold no power over him, and ever since that time the birds have spoken no word that can be understood.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Or so goes the story of the langua verde, a peculiar tongue consisting of whistles and other sounds in marked similarity to bird song. Greensingers, or Green Men, sing songs of empathy and decay. The songs allow them to feel what others are feeling and transmit the same. Skilled Greensingers can learn how to feel falsely, to give fear when they are calm, or to calm the crowd though they have also been roused to anger. The songs also allow them to accelerate the natural processes of destruction by spying weaknesses, magnifying flaws, weakening strengths, and instilling, nurturing, and hastening all rot.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
<em style="border: none; color: inherit;">Your turn: </em>What’s your favorite system of magic, and what do you like so much about it?</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
<em data-mce-style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5;" style="border: none; line-height: 1.5;">R. Donald James Gauvreau works an assortment of odd jobs, most involving batteries. He has recently finished a guide to comparative mythology for worldbuilders, available <a data-mce-href="http://www.mediafire.com/view/kz4dv41ud9fcbdk/Brother_G's_Cyclopedia_of_Comparative_Mythology.pdf" href="http://www.mediafire.com/view/kz4dv41ud9fcbdk/Brother_G's_Cyclopedia_of_Comparative_Mythology.pdf" style="color: #743399;">here</a>for free. He also maintains a blog at <a data-mce-href="http://whitemarbleblock.blogspot.com/" href="http://whitemarbleblock.blogspot.com/" style="color: #743399;">White Marble Block</a>, where he regularly posts story ideas and free fiction, and writes <a data-mce-href="http://www.rpg.net/columns/list-column.phtml?colname=theculturecolumn" href="http://www.rpg.net/columns/list-column.phtml?colname=theculturecolumn" style="color: #743399;">The Culture Column</a>, an RPG.net column with cultures ready for you to drop into your setting. </em></div>
Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-87441110198557510902015-06-17T17:30:00.000-07:002015-08-27T23:44:47.332-07:00Worldbuilding Wednesday: Drug-free Dystopia<i>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. </i><br />
<br />
In an inversion of a popular type of dystopia, the masses are <i>not</i> kept on drugs. In fact, it is only the rulers that are even <i>permitted</i> to do drugs. Everything else will follow from this.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
With this decided we begin to see our dystopic world take shape. It is very straightedge below the top: alcohol, marijuana, acid, and all the rest are banned. And not just this. What the rulers want is for the ruled to see and know only this world. Visions, ideas, and thoughts of other worlds cannot be permitted. Accordingly, while fiction exists it is wholly literary, mainstream, and thisworldly. Historical fiction is popular, but <i>The Lord of the Rings </i>is known only to the rulers.<br />
<br />
Religion is scoffed at by the proles. To the extent that this is possible it is not even known of. Simply telling children about religion before they are old enough is considered to be a form of abuse, endangering a developing mind. Total positivists, the hold that only what can be determined is real and even in the sciences care is taken to avoid conjecture: Nobody even <i>guesses</i> at what color a dinosaur may have been, and remains credible for long.<br />
<br />
Pics or <i>it shouldn't even be talked about</i>, you could say (human testimony is allowed, of course, although we might say that the world is such a surveillance state that it <i>isn't</i> allowed and criminal trials proceed along well enough without human testimony).<br />
<br />
Schizophrenics, &c &c are taken away in the dead of night. The proles fear mental disorders, thinking that the mad are punished for being caught in fantasies even against their will, but in truth these are potential additions to the ruling class. Should they be capable of functioning and telling the difference between this reality and any other that they may be experiencing then they are given position and authority commensurate to this ability. Otherwise they are sealed up for their own good, fisher kings in gilded cages who want for nothing and are given just that much power outside of their luxurious cells.<br />
<br />
Conversely, the rulers are <i>full</i> of religion. They are fit to burst at the seams with it. The religions of today's world have been mixed, remixed, dosed with aced, and served ala mode in order to satisfy the otherworldly, Mantic focus of the rulers. Their God is technicolor and their sacrament is the mescaline wafer and the cup of wine, but make no mistake: they have gods and they have sacraments.<br />
<br />
The rulers dream of other worlds than this to sing in. Their vision for this world is excited and enflamed by their visions of other worlds, and <i>they are not distractible</i>.<br />
<br />
That is really what it comes down to. The masters of this world know the power of bread and circuses. Keep the people focused on the here and now, not even giving them space enough to consider tomorrow. Give them what they think they want but which never truly fills them. Make sure that the supply never runs out, and make sure that they know whose hand is on the tap. Most of all, though, don't let them catch a whiff of true wonder, of genuine ecstasy, of that moment where meet the falling angel and the rising ape.<br />
<br />
The rulers do not generally consider their religions and visions to be objective truths. These are experiences. They are subjective things. But they are subjective things that inspire them to look at the world with fresh eyes and see behind the curtain, and for this reason they are to be equally treasured in oneself and feared in those that elsewise would call themselves thy servant.<br />
<br />
Reality television will be widepspread. Not because it is shitty and pathetic but because it is <i>real</i>. The Controllers probably don't mind the existence of highbrow reality shows any more than they do the shitty ones. Probably there is a certain segment of the population which requires the stimulation of the more complex, ingenious reality shows if they are to be kept content.<br />
<br />
Logban or a similar language is in use. Beautiful, perhaps, but with the utmost precision of language. The idea is not to create a Newspeak-style effect where the proles cannot possibly think of certain off-limits concepts, but to reinforce a certain aesthetic value.<br />
<br />
Perhaps there will be no fiction at all, only reality shows and documentaries and news channels and nonfiction books.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Creative Commons License" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a><br />
This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-51594113903005665942015-06-11T17:30:00.000-07:002015-07-02T17:56:57.313-07:00Things That I Like: 5 More Ways to Use Dragons<ol style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; margin: 0px 0px 24px 1.5em; padding: 0px;">
<li><strong style="color: black;">The old man with jobs for heroes is a dragon</strong></li>
</ol>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
So dragons can shapeshift in your world? And they don’t always get along with each other?</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Think back to <em style="border: none; color: inherit;">The Hobbit</em> and put your Imagining Hat back on. Imagine that Gandalf was a dragon. That Smaug was a rival of his, for territory or treasure or something else, or maybe just an undesirable loose cannon and potential threat somewhere two or three centuries down the line.</div>
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So Gandalf-the-dragon tracks down some dwarfs that have a personal stake in the issue, gives them advice, and sends them in the right direction. Even helps them pick up a hobbit for the journey, too. And the thrush that mentions Smaug’s Achilles’ heel? Shapeshifted Gandalf again.<br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Lesser beings are pieces on a magnificent chess set, moved around by their draconic betters. These are moves in conflicts that can last for centuries before they even come to open blows, and sometimes never do.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Another dragon doesn’t even have to be facing down the metaphorical barrel, either. Dragons can have a multitude of reasons for manipulating humans into doing their dirty work for them.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
And sometimes, of course, dragons head off potential trouble by giving false reports about <em style="border: none; color: inherit;">themselves</em>. Imagine the look on a dragon-hunter’s face when it’s discovered that the secret vulnerability ze was going to exploit doesn’t actually exist.</div>
<ol start="2" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; margin: 0px 0px 24px 1.5em; padding: 0px;">
<li><strong style="color: black;">The dragon used to be an old man with jobs for heroes</strong></li>
</ol>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Alternatively, let’s go back to characters like Fafnir. Dragons aren’t born, they’re made, they’ve <em style="border: none; color: inherit;">become</em>. Sufficient greed and obsession, centered on a sufficiently-large hoard, can cause a transformation into a dragon. It may be slow and gradual or very sudden.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
A dragon’s new life came on account of its hoard, and its life is forever subject to the same. Dragons can be controlled by holding their hoards for ransom. Luckily, this is usually as far as it goes. A dragon’s strength and power are linked to its hoard and it can be killed if the hoard is destroyed, but dragons seldom fear this fate. They know how hard it is for their former peers to do away with such treasures. More likely is that the thief will turn miserly as well, and a new dragon will be the result of it.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Dwarf-keeps are generally ruled by dragons, of course. More dragons were originally dwarfs than any other species, in fact. Whether this is a natural tendency or their culture has been warped by centuries of dragon rule is anyone’s guess.</div>
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I say “alternatively” in the beginning there, but I should add that these ideas are not mutually exclusive. In this scenario dragons have already changed shape once. Who’s to say that they can’t shapeshift back, either into their original form or into anything that their minds conceive. Maybe there are supernatural tells, maybe it’s a flawless impersonation.</div>
<ol start="3" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; margin: 0px 0px 24px 1.5em; padding: 0px;">
<li><strong style="color: black;">The most important part of a dragon’s hoard is the dragon</strong></li>
</ol>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Maybe dragons hoard gold and jewels. Maybe they don’t. Either way, though, the real profit from dragon-hunting is in harvesting body parts. Every part of the dragon is useful.</div>
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The scales make a serviceable armor. The fangs and claws may be made into weapons. But many of the other body parts may be rendered into potions. Dragons possess a venom in their teeth that keeps long and well in glass decanters. Or perhaps the venom, so quick to kill, is a multipurpose fluid that is also behind their fire.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Perhaps it is their blood, and causes paranoia and various hallucinations. Hence the tales of dragon-slayers that speak to birds after killing a dragon (especially if it can turn into a gas upon contact with the air, which can also add danger to the very fighting of a dragon). Or maybe the hallucinations are the natural side effect of getting down into the depths of reality, where things are truer and the phenomenal world is revealed to be merely symbolic. Or maybe it just makes you invulnerable, as Sigurd discovered.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
The heart may prolong the lifespan, cure diseases, or grant strength. The eyes aren’t actually magic, but they do taste pretty good and make an excellent soup.</div>
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<li><strong style="color: black;">The next step is body modification</strong></li>
</ol>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Silly dragon-slayer, you don’t go and use up a dragon’s bits like that. Didn’t you hear that the future is in renewable resources?</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Wizards are the elite of society. They’re almost defined by their practice of grafting parts of dragons to themselves. Some of them have a smile like a shark’s, full of razor-sharp dragon fangs. Some of them have new blood flowing through their veins, opening their ears to the language of the birds. Some have threaded dragon muscle in with theirs, or grafted tough skin in place of their own.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Almost all of them have replaced their hearts. It’s the first thing that you want to do, even if it has a fair chance of killing you. With a dragon’s heart in your chest your lifespan can be measured in the centuries.</div>
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In some ways scientific progress is right on the level for a fantasy society, but medical science (surgery in particular) is on the cutting edge, if not entirely past anything that we can do today. Wizards direct all of their efforts in this direction, because improving the grafting process is an effort that never fails to bear fruits.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Some wizards push the boundaries of what should be possible, even allowing for magical cross-species organ transplants. Some have chopped up their stomachs to make room for additional organs, and rely on intravenous drips or nutrient slurries. Others are simply content to become bloated parodies of their former selves</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Wizards. Biotech. Body horror. Dragons through and through that all. What are you waiting for?</div>
<ol start="5" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; margin: 0px 0px 24px 1.5em; padding: 0px;">
<li><strong style="color: black;">Actually, don’t touch anything there at all, mkay?</strong></li>
</ol>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
A dragon’s hoard is <em style="border: none; color: inherit;">cursed</em>, man. It’s the dragon’s last revenge against thieves and murderers that would despoil it and rob its treasures.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Perhaps you hallucinate or turn mad. Perhaps you become mad with greed (maybe even as the result of partial possession by the dragon’s own spirit) until you’ll kill someone for looking at your hoard wrong.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
The curse may be applied to the hoard and whoever owns so much as a single coin of it. This means that the curse can be transmitted vertically, generation to generation, and also be spread horizontally, so that many people are affected. Does it matter how much of the hoard you have, or is the person in possession of a cup subject to the curse to the same degree as the person who owns everything else? Does giving up the hoard relieve the curse?</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
<em style="border: none; color: inherit;">Your turn: </em>What are some other interesting ways that dragons could be used in a story?</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
<em data-mce-style="color: #444444; line-height: 1.5;" style="border: none; line-height: 1.5;">R. Donald James Gauvreau works an assortment of odd jobs, most involving batteries. He has recently finished a guide to comparative mythology for worldbuilders, available <a data-mce-href="http://www.mediafire.com/view/kz4dv41ud9fcbdk/Brother_G's_Cyclopedia_of_Comparative_Mythology.pdf" href="http://www.mediafire.com/view/kz4dv41ud9fcbdk/Brother_G's_Cyclopedia_of_Comparative_Mythology.pdf" style="color: #743399;">here</a>for free. He also maintains a blog at <a data-mce-href="http://whitemarbleblock.blogspot.com/" href="http://whitemarbleblock.blogspot.com/" style="color: #743399;">White Marble Block</a>, where he regularly posts story ideas and free fiction, and writes <a data-mce-href="http://www.rpg.net/columns/list-column.phtml?colname=theculturecolumn" href="http://www.rpg.net/columns/list-column.phtml?colname=theculturecolumn" style="color: #743399;">The Culture Column</a>, an RPG.net column with cultures ready for you to drop into your setting. </em></div>
Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-41445452859699324802015-06-10T17:30:00.000-07:002015-06-10T17:30:00.909-07:00Worldbuilding Wednesday: Parasite-Concepts from Alternate or Failed Universes<i>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. </i><br />
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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. </div>
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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. </div>
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Except, they sort of do. Some of them, anyway. <a name='more'></a></div>
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These concepts integrate themselves into people and other things, sustaining their half-existence on a full, complete one, and existing in a symbiotic-bordering-on-parasitic relationship (they rarely care about helping beyond whatever is necessary to keep themselves "alive", but if you can adjust to how you have been changed then you are-- mostly-- in control). It is an odd existence, being the host for an alternate history, an element that used to exist on the periodic table in some never-was universe, or a two-dimensional lifeform, and it warps the way that you think and the way that you interact with the universe. </div>
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It puts you in danger, too, because there's Something Out There that doesn't like all of these loose ends running around and is trying to clean them up. Not to mention that sometimes your parasite-concept gets the better of you and directs you in ways that you don't understand (sometimes don't even recognize). It's one thing to be the host for a nonexistent color and quite another one to be the host for a nonexistent color that sometimes needs people to just... die. </div>
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Parasite-concepts have some control, but not much. They don't have much chance to float around on their own so after losing a host they are limited mostly to whatever is in the immediate area, unless they want to take some big risks. They are also somewhat limited by their hosts: their thinking power isn't much better than the thinking power of the host, so inhabiting a human gives them an edge in surviving. A pyramid-bound parasite-concept is for all intents and purposes merely existing-- it doesn't even have enough self-awareness to know that it exists. </div>
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How did they gain sentience, or even enough instinct to know that survival is important? I guess we'll have to chalk that one up to them being... Well, they're Something, and "magic" is just as good of a descriptor as any other, but the most accurate statement would probably be to say that they're inherently weird and just leave it at that. </div>
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There are things called Symphonies, which are groups of multiple parasite-concepts that are inhabiting the same host for some reason. Either they are linked in some way (a song and the nonexistent emotion that it was written to inspire) or they find that they complement each other in some fashion and/or have similar goals (far less common, and usually much more temporary). They probably aren't common at all. If this concept were for a trilogy then there would be only one, maybe two, of them in the whole series, and definitely not among the main characters. </div>
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Symphonies are also not known for their mental stability. </div>
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<br />
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Creative Commons License" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a><br />
This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-79378244972379686172015-06-03T17:30:00.000-07:002015-10-19T22:46:27.497-07:00Worldbuilding Wednesday: Tiger-souled humans and mad scientist werewolves<i>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. </i><br />
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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.<br />
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So, human with a soul of a tiger. Shapeshifting is possibly, but it is <i>really painful</i> and against the natural order. Of course, having a mismatched soul like this is <i>also</i> against the natural order, but when you break one thing it's easier to break another.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Maybe folks like this, with mismatched souls and such, can break the rules in other ways. They might have to explore and practice to figure out how to do it, but it's possible.<br />
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Let's go with an Old Man Coyote for another character. Sometimes he's clearly the antagonist, and other times our protagonist just isn't sure. Sometimes villainous, maybe, but that doesn't always align with when he's the antagonist. But he's got the soul of a coyote, and he's a tricky bastard.<br />
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What about on the other side of the line, though? What about an animal with a human soul? Let's go with a human-souled wolf. <i>A werewolf</i>. It was smart, and it could figure things out. It wanted to get into the right kind of body, and at some point along the way it got into magic. It tried to put its soul in a human vessel but to date has only succeeded in grafting fragments of its combined nature to humans, spreading parts of its mind and personality and making them lesser versions of itself. They can change shape too (maybe some can only do it in part).<br />
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<i>To date</i>. These wrong-souled folks are immortal. They can't die. The universe doesn't process them right.<br />
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I think that we have our big antagonist. The head werewolf is replicating zemself, so there is no dissension in the ranks. Our protagonist is going to be facing an enemy that is smart and (haha) <i>unified. </i>I wonder if some sort of zombie effect can be achieved by biting people or whatever. If so, there needs to be a reason why the Big Bad doesn't just bite everyone and have done with it. It is possible that the plot is about the Big Bad finally deciding to do just that, but... Even so it would be best if there were some sort of limitation.<br />
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What does it mean to have a soul of one sort over another, though? How does "the natural order" distinguish between the various species of big cat? Where is the line between black and white rhinoceros, or is there one?<br />
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The universe probably runs on Plato. The fact that there are Forms will probably be important somehow. The "Bad Stuff" (if indeed there is out-and-out Bad Stuff at all) will probably be perverted Forms. Which, um, might include even our protagonist, even if our protagonist is "fighting for the side of Good" or whatever. Like nuclear waste dumped in a river, our protagonist is both the result of some kind of pollution and the cause of further damage just by existing.<br />
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And/or, whether the universe actually is a simulation, it can easily be considered in such terms. The universe "tags" things in order to keep track of them and interact with them properly. Most people are tagged as "human" and most tigers are tagged as "tiger" but our tiger-souled protagonist is somebody who's been given the "tiger" tag. Now, for the most part this tagging system doesn't make itself relevant, but the incongruity does confuse the universe, to personify it for a moment, and that's where problems can creep in. Essentially, there's... some confusion going on in the World of Forms, as Plato would put it.<br />
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I wonder if there are non-human beings who are physically non-human (maybe even a plant!) but because of Tagging Weirdness everything perceives them as being human. Or humans who are physically human but for the same reason are perceived as being non-human. A talking dog or plant character who is actually a human with some Tagging Weirdness, maybe.<br />
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The main purpose of this exercise, as mentioned in the beginning, is to see how much potential is in a particular idea. I... don't really think that this one is for me. But do <i>you</i> like it? Like everything that I'm posting on this blog, this idea is in the Creative Commons. <i>If it's shiny, then be a magpie. </i><br />
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<b>Questions to answer: </b><br />
<ul>
<li>The creator of the werewolves used some sort of magic in order to get this stuff done. So, what's magic like in this setting? How does it work? All "manipulation of the soul" stuff, or something more? </li>
</ul>
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<b>Edit [10/19/2015]</b></div>
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<ul>
<li>Souls, or whatever is used to "tag" beings, get reused after a being's death. Souls are usually reset between uses, but sometimes they don't get reset, and that's when you have, say, a tiger-souled girl. It's a bug in the program, and probably prevents the soul from being reclaimed properly. And if the wipe was messed up, it's likely that there are other problems as well. </li>
<ul>
<li>If I discard this idea, then another possibility is that souls are differentiated from each other along a gradient.</li>
</ul>
<li>Souls are more like hardware than software, empty computer disks that carry consciousness. "You, as an individual, are the programming on that soul." Improperly-wiped souls may be able to get snatches of memory, bits of personality and thought processes, from their previous lives. </li>
<li>Underling wolves probably only have partial shapeshifting. Weird-werewolf-zombie-apocalypse thing is probably part of the Big Bad's master plan. Perhaps he's trying to force a reset, becoming a kind of virus so that he can mess up the whole system and force its creators to shut everything down.</li>
<li>The more that a mis-souled person uses zir condition to manipulate glitches, the more buggy ze gets. </li>
</ul>
</div>
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Creative Commons License" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a><br />
This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-73803971578097884872015-06-01T17:30:00.000-07:002015-07-03T15:27:48.614-07:00World: The Science CrusadeNot 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.<br />
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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 <i>alien space bats</i>.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
The Blasphemous Equation was published in 1883, a year after the publication of <i>The Gay Science</i> by Friedrich Nietzsche, which included the famous passage "Gott ist tott", or "God is dead". Despite what he really meant by those words they were still fresh in the minds of its readers when the Blasphemous Equation was published and Nietzsche, who would live until 1912, was not only regarded as a prophet (in the non-religious sense of the word) but given much better attention by those who accepted the truth of the Blasphemous Equation. Nietzsche's constantly evolving philosophy would be picked over by nearly every influential group to arise in the next few generations (while only a few of them paid more attention to what he meant than to which choice bits served their interests, this was business as usual).<br />
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<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Queen
Victoria was the first major figure to accept the Blasphemous Equation,
declaring her support in 1884 and over the next year reforming the Anglican
Church into the College of England, a nontheistic organization charged with the
duties of expanding the bounds of human knowledge, revering the strength of human
reason, and seeing to it that the Blasphemous Equation was known of and
accepted even in the furthest reaches of the globe. This decision was based in
Queen Victoria's willingness to accept what was true and turn it to her
advantage rather than try to deny it, and certainly helped along by the
nationality of the Equation's creator and the relative acceptance of atheism
and agnosticism in the United Kingdom.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
At
least half of the Church of England's clergy were not retained during the
transition, either because they objected to it or because they were completely unsuited to
the new environment. In part because of his popularity but almost certainly
also because it was understood that he would only grow more influential in the
future Queen Victoria extended an invitation to Nietzsche on behalf of the
College of England. He would eventually decline, feeling that even as it stood
presently the British acceptance of atheism did naught to improve their moral sense,
despite the fact that he was still feeling the sting of the University of Leipzig's rejection of
his application for professorship the past year. While he would not ever
officially join the College of England he still regularly exchanged
correspondence with numerous College officials, including, on occasion, Queen
Victoria herself.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
1889
was another notable year. While Scotland Yard was investigating the eight
murders committed by Jack the Ripper, Pope Leo XIII, known for intellectualism
and trying to reconcile the Church and modern thinking, was writing a
thirty-page encyclical which amounted to the following: <i>It should be impossible to disprove the existence of God. It is not
something which can be disproved. The man who is convinced by it will say
"Oh, but here it is all the same. Interesting paradox, but nothing
more." How this has happened is clear- God wishes for us to no longer
believe in Him. So who are we to disregard the will of God? </i>This philosophy
came to be known as Pious Disbelief and spread admirably quickly, especially
after some more fanatical believers' actions blew up in their faces by making
the position of continued religious observance look worse. The doctrine would
finally die out in the mainstream partly because of repressive actions on the
part of countries like the Three Romes and White Germany but mostly because Pious
Disbelief is one of those things that becomes very popular among the existing
elements but doesn't catch on to newcomers. In other words, while it's easy
enough for already-religious people to "get it" and join, it doesn't
make as much sense to new generations to believe in a philosophy which amounts
to "don't believe." It's a lot easier to just ignore it as a
curiosity and legitimately disbelieve in God instead of exercising doublethink
to disbelieve in God because God said to do so. Which, for obvious reasons, was felt to be quite alright by the proponents of Pious Disbelief. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Another
interesting philosophy was held by the Self-Annihilationists, who believed that
the Blasphemous Equation was the second part of Christ's Atonement. Not only
the sins of the world had to be atoned for by Christ— by creating the world and
allowing the possibility of sin, God was responsible for and thus guilty of
every sin committed as well. Sacrifice was necessary to atone for this and for
an all-powerful, all-knowing being the only genuine sacrifice possible would be
permanent destruction (temporary destruction might suffice for a
less-than-omniscient being but because He was all-knowing He would see past His
death and to His resurrection, if it were only temporary, which would make it
scarcely worse than falling asleep for a bit). The Blasphemous Equation was at once
the suicide of God and His announcement of it, now that the world was mature
enough to go on without Him.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
The
Catholic Church would splinter into no less than eight separate churches, the
seven offshoots denying the doctrine of Pious Disbelief. Only two of these
churches would survive for more than twenty years. Under the Pope's direction
the Catholic Church slowly reorganized itself to focus on charity work and
re-assuming role, once held in the Middle Ages, of spreading and preserving
knowledge.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
The
League of Three Emperors was maintained in the difficult times post-Blasphemy,
leading to a cemented alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia by 1916,
which saw the beginnings of the three-year-long Great War. The League would
include the Ottoman Empire with France as a target to hobble in any way
possible, thanks to Russia's rivalry with the Ottoman's. Russia retained its
easterly imperial ambitions and the Russo-Japanese War occurred as it did in
our history, again with a Japanese victory. With slightly-saner decisions made
by the British (who, in this history, did not take control of several ships
they had been building for the Ottomans without asking), and their enemy the
Russians part of the Central Powers, the Ottoman Empire ended up on the side of
the Entente/Allies.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
A
couple of years after the beginning of the Great War, Alexander Kerensky
(currently in charge of the provisional government that was created after the
abdication of Tsar Nicholas II the year before) withdrew from the conflict in
order to ease internal tensions and focus on preventing the civil war that he
foresaw as a possibility. Having been allied with Russia, Germany had no reason
to send Lenin over, and the provisional government remained intact until it
lost the “provisional” qualifier. It would be subverted by fascist elements
when the Great Depression struck Russia. Like the Italians they drummed up
visions of being the true heirs of Rome and its Empire, claiming this
distinction through the marriage of Ivan III to Sophia Paleologue, who was the
niece of the last Byzantine Emperor (that the tsars no longer had anything more
than a ceremonial role was ignored by the fascists). While the Russian Orthodox
Church had been dying this whole time, Fascist Russia would resurrect the
rituals (though not the theology) of the church as an essential part of Russian
culture, fusing it permanently with government offices. The Ottomans followed suit shortly thereafter and brought
up their own old fancies of being heirs to the Romans. The Sultan
resurrected Mehmed II's self-given title Kayser-i Rum, or Conqueror of the
Romans.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
In
part because of the sudden pull of support by Russia, Germany fared far worse
in the Great War than it had in our history, going so far as to see foreign armies
march halfway to Berlin before the country's surrender was made and accepted.
Hyperinflation and vast unemployment led to a Communist revolution (a
surprisingly proportion of Navy and ex-Navy personnel were Communists, and this
group led the revolution) in 1926, half a decade after the end of the Great
War.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
German
Communism would quickly get caught up in racist ideologies and went down the
road of YAY ARYANS. Interestingly, however, their conception of Aryans was more
traditional than our present-day conception of a blue-eyed, blond-haired
Caucasian: the Irish, Iranians, Tibetans, and Indians were all considered to be
Aryan peoples. This may have been linked to the British Empire's hold on India
and Ireland and the German hatred of said empire. By claiming these people to
be Aryan, the German people were obligated to free their enslaved brothers.
Communist elements in the British Empire would grow steadily stronger with each
passing decade. By the middle of the Twentieth Century Communist revolutions would
be seen in most of Britain's colonies, all of them aided by Germany and its
allies (including Iran), and half of those revolutions would be successful.
Communism disdained centralism and bureaucracy and never became the
seemingly-monolithic structure that the USSR presented. Each country was an
“independent republic,” and each such republic was a federation whose
constituent states sometimes got along better with the states of other
independent republics than the ones that were right next to them. As relations
developed deepened between Germany and India and the latter became almost as
important to the development of Communist theory as the country which
originated it, Buddhism- in its atheistic form, of course- traveled to Europe
and became wrapped up in Communism. Communist leaders especially valued the
Buddhist emphasis on asceticism. The term <i>a</i><i><span lang="DE">rbeitskomfort</span></i> became common in Communist writings from that
time on. Literally meaning “working comfort” but more often translated to as
“labor nirvana,” it described a state of perfect satisfaction that existed when
performing one's duties as best as possible.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Ernest
Duchesne discovered penicillin in 1897 after expanding his studies to include
humans, and this did not only result in a lowered loss of life from disease
(including typhoid, which was not affected by the strain of penicillin
discovered by Alexander Fleming) but managed to save Japan, which did not
succumb to militarism. The cause for this lay in the Taisho Emperor, who caught
pneumonia in 1926 but (thanks to the use of penicillin) was able to recover from
it and live for another twenty years before dying at the age of sixty-seven. He
was in as ill of health as ever, though, which meant that the Diet continued to
function more independently and the parliamentary system had more time to root
itself into the government before power changed hands. The Diet would
successfully prevent Japan from initiating a war, but depending on history
plays out the country may be dragged into one regardless. Another useful
medicine developed early is the anti-malarial qinghao, discovered in the '40s
along with a number of other traditional remedies which, upon thorough
examinations, turned out to have basis in fact.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
The
Great Depression in the '30s led to what was the Russians called the Великий
работа* or “great work.” These were essentially make-work programs designed to
ease unemployment while at the same time performing some major task for the
country. The great industrialization projects of Russia, which propelled the
country from agricultural backwater to manufacturing powerhouse, was just one
result of this period (indeed, these индустриализациы** or “industrializations” actually began in the
late '20s and are considered to have continued long after the Great Depression).
Work on the Shakespeare-Sangatte Tunnel linking Britain and France was begun in
the middle of the decade. Cross-country expressways, designed primarily for the
transport of goods and important personnel, were constructed in many countries,
the first being Italy. The Ottoman Empire began work on damming the Red Sea,
which would produce near-limitless amounts of electricity. The “Usonian cities”
(more accurately, small towns) of Frank Lloyd Wright (most principally the
first, Wrighttown) were constructed by the United States Government as a means
to fundamentally redesign city living at the time. The four Usonian cities
constructed in this decade would go on to inspire future attempts for the rest
of the Twentieth Century. “Workpartment” buildings housed both businesses and
the employees who worked there, echoing the similar “integrated civic centers,”
vast complexes that included everything from libraries and opera houses to
shops, homes, and parking garages.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
*velikiy rabota<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
**industrializatsii<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
These
and similar projects like the Great Plains Treebelt (designed to mitigate the
effects of the Dust Bowl in the US) may have been matched in number by more
conventional fare but they sparked the Engineering Race, which saw each country
trying to outdo the others in the construction of projects that had the
capability to change the whole game. As the decades wore on the world saw the
creation of the Gibraltar Bridge in the '40s, the Transatlantic Tunnel in the
'50s (a submerged floating tunnel traveled by train and linking New York City
and London), the Second Nile in the early '60s just before the Three Romes War
and the mile-high California tower in San Francisco some time after its
outbreak, massive seawater greenhouses and a square-kilometer radio array in
the '80s, and the damming of the Bering Strait shortly after the turn of the
Millennium.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Contemporary
projects include the construction of a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar.
TowerTown, built in Japan shortly before the end of the Twentieth Century, is a
massive, almost self-contained structure that stands almost as high as the
California and holds more than 100,000 people, most of whom not only live there
but also work and shop in the building. Tunnels have been carved through the
Alps, Berlin's cultural, art, and historical museum is nearly the size of a
small town, solar collectors collectively stretch across hundreds of thousands
of square kilometers around the world (to say nothing of China's “windmill
jungle”), and half a million people spend at least six months out of the year
on one of the world's several floating cities.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
The
Three Romes War was a conflict that broke out in the '60s, waged between Russia,
Italy, the Ottoman Empire and their respective allies. The British Empire had
previously attempted to remain neutral in dealings with Italy and the Ottoman
Empire, both being old allies of the empire during the Great War generations
earlier, but the British Empire ultimately sided with the Ottomans, which
promised to help Britain to crush Communism after the war was over and recover
her lost colonies and were in a better position than Italy to do so. The
post-war map that the British envisioned saw them extending their influence
over most of Europe and their original colonies and the Ottomans taking the
rest of Asia and the areas around the Mediterranean. Germany remained out of
the war (in the end they couldn't decide who they hated the least), as did most
other White Communist countries, but a few small republics did help Russia.
Russia would also be helped by most of the Slavic countries in Europe (barely
any of them were not dependent on Russia to some degree) and Mongolia. Iran
would fight for Russia indirectly by providing resources when needed (while
considered part of the White Communist bloc it was still very much a distinct
entity in its own right and was not even fully Communist; among other things it
still had a shah). Italy was sadly outgunned in this conflict, counting on but
ultimately unable to bring in British support and having to fall back on the
aid of Spain and a couple of smaller countries. The United States just stayed
out of the whole thing and managed to keep a tight grip on its isolationist
policy; in modern times the US doesn't do anything so long as you stay away
from the American continents and keep your finger away from that damned Red
Button.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
The
Three Romes War saw the development of atomic weapons and their use in the
final leg of the war when Russia dropped The Bomb on the city of Rome,
destroying the country's command structure and the symbolism of the False Rome
in one fell swoop. It was probably no coincidence that the Vatican City was
within the blast radius; the morale of the Roman Secular-Catholic Church would
never recover from this devastation. With the threat of a bomb being dropped on
London or another city, the British quickly withdrew, and three bombs were
dropped on strategic targets in the Ottoman Empire one month later.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
The
support of Russia and the fascist movement by Vladimir Jabotinsky and other
Jewish Fascists resulted in reciprocated support of the Jewish people by
Fascist Russia, which did not fail to note the advantages in being friendly to a group that was
otherwise persecuted in the world. In the aftermath of the war and the so-called Breaking
of the False Romes, when Russia took many Italian and Ottoman territories and
partitioned some of the rest, Russia made sure to erect a Jewish puppet state
in Palestine. It was constructed according to the plans laid out by Vladimir
Jabotinsky years before and, logically enough, was fascist.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
The
Jewish people are worth noting for other reasons. A great many Jews turned to
atheism, something aided by the teachings of contemporary Abraham Isaac Kook,
who said that atheism was actually the purest form of worship because even the
strictest Jewish interpretation of God still fell dangerously close to being a
man-made idol. Kook saw the Blasphemous Equation as a miracle intended to “burn
away” every false model of monotheism, which happened to include every form of
religion. Regardless of whether they turned to atheism because they were
genuinely convinced of the Equation's truth or because they felt it was God's
will, nearly all Jews continued to observe the various traditions associated
with the group, which were seen as being tied up not with the Jewish religion
but with their heritage and culture. This explanation did not and does not hold
water with the citizens of anti-Semitic countries, which claimed that the Jews
were fools who still believed in supernatural beings and, worse, sought to
force religion on everyone else. Even in modern times the Jewish people would
find the most support in fascist countries, which only rarely forgot the
support that had been given them by the Jews. Many different groups would
develop from the Jewish people, each differing on which rituals were believed
to still have relevance in modern times, and because of the increased relevance
of Jewishness as culture and ethnicity rather than religion most would reject
outsiders' attempts to self-identify as Jews unless they had married into the culture (and sometimes not even then).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
While
not much has been developed in the United States yet, it has currently been
determined that the Civil Rights movement will be pushed back a couple of
decades. With the lack of a Holocaust to point out how bad racism is to some
people who really needed help figuring that out, increased stress, and a whole
lot less success overall, the movement is likely but not definitely going to
turn violent.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Thanks
to Germany still being a scientific focus, German is the lingua franca of the
scientific world even after it turns White. Other large alliances turn somewhat
inward though (Russia, Israel, and their allies prefer Russian). French is the
language of diplomacy, and also the scientific language of the Entente bloc.
Science is by no means a sacred cow in this world; there's as much politicizing
and abuse of it as there was in most totalitarian countries in our history, or
of religion in any country in our history. In most countries a theory is
accepted not necessarily because it is true but because it supports the party
line. This doesn't apply across the board; a country may make heavy use of
scientific racism but have no problem with what the latest chemistry theories
say or the race of who designed those theories.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Russia
and its allies are proponents of the Steady State theory, seeing in it
parallels with the state of man (ie. Just as the universe has always existed,
so too has the best kind of society always existed, as shown by the Romans and
others like them). Lamarckian evolution is supported by the White Communists,
who claim that cultural evolution leads to biological evolution and that
Communist society will lead to the human race evolving into a higher state
while all other forms of society will naturally lead to their members devolving
into degenerate forms. This particular style of racism was in part implemented
to justify the inclusion of non-Aryan Communists. They'll always be less
evolved than Aryans because they don't have as much of a head start, but even
Africans can be Communists.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
The
theory that language shapes thought was seized upon by several groups including
White Germany, all of which claim that inferior languages lead to inferior
minds and cultures and that their language is of course the true supreme
language. Artificial languages in general are more accepted. One of the ongoing
projects of the Anglican College since the 1970s is the creation of a language
superior to all others that exist currently or potentially. The Anglican
College in general has decayed into theory for theory's sake. They turned up
their nose at the Engineering Race and focused instead on pure theory rather
than tangible designs and proofs. Every decade that passes, the Anglicans'
attention is turned to ever-obscurer fields of science, some of which only
exist in the halls of the College of England, and most of the tangible projects
worked on by its members are lofty, possibly-worthless things like the Babel
Project.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Soap
operas and talk-shows are insanely common in White Communist countries.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Pop
music is mostly instrumental or mass singing with a few individual celebrities.
A focus has been placed on media that is enjoyable in large groups; while
televisions [incomplete]<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
In
White Communist countries there is a focus on entertainment forms which are
easily enjoyable in large groups. Cheap “pulplets,” usually derivative but on
rare occasion innovative, are the most common form of fictional literature and
are eschewed by members of the government and others who either have positions
of prestige or wish to emulate such people. Television is usually relegated to
news and talk shows, but again there [incomplete]<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
The
recursive romance is a form of love story that began to appear in the British
Empire in the late '70s, marked by its protagonists' awareness of the genre's
usual tropes and, quite often, subversions of those tropes. Love stories have
become increasingly more than cookie-cutter stories since the emergence of this
subgenre, which is popular in other Entente bloc countries and in South
America.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
The
home of modern animation truly must be said to be Israel. While for most of the
Twentieth Century the United States and Italy dominated animation, since the
2010s animation has increasingly been done in the distinctly Israeli “superrealism”
style, which is difficult to immediately distinguish from live action and is
marked by the reduced cost of special effects. Several movies animated in the
Israeli style take pleasure in switching between live action and animation and
making it a seamless transition impossible to detect even somehow points it out
to you. An older form, still common in comics and paintings, is the
heavily-stylistic “ecstatic.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Other
notes of mention is that button rifling was developed in the 1930s, letting
rifle and machine gun barrels be produced at a fraction of the cost and time,
and wristwatches are still called wristlets even in the present.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Russia
and Germany became fascist and communist respectively not just because I liked
the idea of switching the two but because I liked the idea of exploring
Russia's old claims to being Third Rome and I felt that Karl Marx deserved some
love in his nation of origin. Despite Marx being a Jew, the Germans are still
anti-Semitic because this would hardly be the first time that people were
hypocritical like that. While it is unlikely that the Taisho Emperor would get
pneumonia in the exact year that he did in our history, it is probable that he
would have been killed at some point without the drug or one similar to it, and
it ultimately makes no difference whether his life is saved in 1926 or 1936.
Abraham Isaac Kook probably did not get his ideas about Jewish atheism until
after the Blasphemous Equation would have likely butterflied them away, but
someone was going to say it and I decided that it may as well be someone who,
in our history, really did say it in that same period of history. Frank Lloyd
Wright was an architect long before the Blasphemous Equation was published and
the term “Usonian” was first used in the mid-1800s, similarly protecting it
from butterflies.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
I'm
currently debating where I want homosexuality to still be banned, where I want
it to have been banned up until the late Twentieth Century, and where I want it
to have been legalized relatively early on. Certainly it would be accepted more
easily without religious elements going against it but that's not the only
reason one might speak against it (see the USSR's stance on homosexuality, for
example). It's probably going to be banned, even in modern times, in White
Communist countries, but I'm not sure.</div>
<br />
<div class="Standard">
The perpetrator [Jack the Ripper] is a woman, aided by the painter Walter
Sickert, who had an artistic interest in the murders. Jack would resume the
killings thirty years later to the day in 1929. Walter would initially help
attempts to bring her to justice without implicating himself but in time got
caught up in it and slipped into his previous behavior.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
Anglican Church becomes humanist institution<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
No Nobel Prize<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
A book series recently commenced, with one volume every five
years, which will present the Abel Prize laureates and their research.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
Red Sea Dam constructed. Also a test for Atlantropa<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
G-Cans-like structure constructed<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
Atlantropa project commenced<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
The Great Hedge of India is not destroyed in the 1880s</div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
Business Plot-like conspiracy that succeeds<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
Drive to eliminate smallpox and other diseases<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
Engineering Race<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
More barrage balloons and airships as scoutships in the Navy
during WW1<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
---</div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
[comments from other people who discussed the idea with me]</div>
<div class="Standard">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Aside
from the contribution Jews and African-Americans have made to US humor, people
of a totalitarian dispostion generally lack much subtlety in their sense of
humor: a Jew being run over with a steamroller is about their speed. Irony is
supect, and authority is not to be poked fun of (as long as it is not <i>undermensch</i> authority)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Movies
under fascism were pure escapism. Comedies,musicals,adventures,love. technically were very advanced.</div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
I
thought that was the point I made. Westerns are an important part of US culture
so Fascist American cinema would still have westerns but with a Fascist
ideology, which is (inasmuch as there is one!) Us versus Them. Although Fascist
Westerns may be more about Man coping in a harsh environment, and only
occasionally being threatened by various degenerates, or perhaps about the
temptations of frontier towns.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
As
for the American Civil War: The powers that be would probably have a tough time
trying to figure out how to handle that one. Classical Fascist ideology, after
all, exalts the unity of the state, which militates in favor of pro-Union
portrayals. If you're going for more Nazi-style "white power"
ideology, though, you'd want films portraying the Confederate point of view
with the utmost sympathy. <i>Birth of a
Nation</i> would be a good template for this.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Comics were historically common in poor countries<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard">
</div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Radio
novels<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Suppose
Britain keeps doesn't lose Tanzania to Germany, and manages to consolidate all
the East African colonies; suppose Cecil Rhodes gets his Red Line, and then
some, as the colonies are tied together and have a large white settler
population. Decolonization comes, none
of the individual parts are able to throw off the settlers without bringing
down the wrath of the state upon them. So the only way the black majority can
do so is by hanging together, which means they need a non-national banner to
unite behind -- and essentially, that means communism.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Desalinated
manmade rivers in Africa<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
"Jewish
philanthropists considered Mexican Jewry a worthy recipient of aid and, in
1891, the Baron de Hirsch Fund, along with the Jewish Colonization Association
(JCA) planned large-scale Jewish agricultural settlements in Mexico, much like
the kibbutzim the philanthropists were developing in Israel. However, these
plans never materialized."<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<a href="http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Mexico.html"><span style="color: windowtext; text-decoration: none; text-underline: none;">http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/Mexico.html</span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
I
recall reading(not sure if this is true or not, but it is quite plausible) that
by the 1860's and early 1870's, there was a small, but growing, urban
middle-class sector composed of ex-slaves and freeborn blacks in Brazil. By the
1900's, they were mostly gone - European immigrants had took their place.
Assuming the above statements are true, if you find a way to revert this
situation, you get your scenario. Actually as late as the 1920's you could find
an important black urban middle-class in some cities. If you look at photos
from the graduation of new teachers for public schools in Rio in the 1910's you
can notice that many of them were black. But when you find photos from the
1930's all the blacks disappeared, replaced by white immigrants.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
What
if human meat was popular with the wealthy and was being sold on the black
market?</div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Of
course, if we're assuming that this is an illegal operation, we'd be looking at
a situation more akin to hunting. I've met a few people who hunt for meat (as a
luxury, not a necessity, it's costly over here), and they regularly pass up the
chance to shoot large, old animals in favour of younger, tastier ones even if
the trophies aren't as impressive. The best place to go, I guess, would be
trafficking networks. Reasonably healthy female teenagers are in fairly
plentiful supply (and probably preferable to uncastrated males in flavour -
it's common across many species). So that's where the supply end most like
comes in. Rural third world girls would be easiest, the less attractive ones
that wouldn't be picked up by the sex traffickers. The next question is how the system would
work. I assume distribution channels similar to bushmeat, with a small but very
wealthy clientele supporting a highly specialised smuggling network. You
couldn't trust the average trafficker not to freak if he found out where his
merchandise ended up. You know, there
really is no way to say whether this isn't in existence. Who'd have believed a
few years ago that girls were routinely kept as house slaves in Europe and the
USA, or that people were smuggling gorilla meat as a delicacy?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
By
today, I'd envision Jews to have a position somewhat analogous to that of
homosexuals today. Equal rights in theory, active associations with public
relations wings, activist lawyers and some degree of political solidarity,
with some nations being quite advanced in their integration while others
actively undermine their theoretical equality. Such a world would not be
antisemitic. Certainly not. Some of its best friends will be Jews. But, you
know, do you really think the military is the place for them? How about banking... <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Don't
forget about Argentina. At this time Argentina was one of the main destinations
for Jews as well as being seen as a possibility for the Jewish State by Theodor
Herzl.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
I've
got one: Australia has an awful lot of uranium... As said, it had a lot of
uranium and wasn't it an important naval base for the RN and USN for some of
WWII? (And you don't need "the bomb" to make uranium important; a
society with a lot of reactors but no bombs is perfectly imaginable, in which
case uranium will be a strategic resource on par with coal or oil (which have
had wars fought over them). Admittedly, it's hard to imagine a society with a
lot of reactors where the ability to build a bomb is unknown, but that takes a
while--estimated at a couple of months for Japan, for instance--so you can
imagine someone trying a hasty thrust to capture Australia for the uranium and
hoping that they can negotiate a peace that leaves them in control of the
place).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
</div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<br /></div>
<div class="Standard" style="text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
Humanitarian
Japan</div>
<br />
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This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-66617512131767639012015-05-27T17:30:00.000-07:002015-06-01T19:00:31.687-07:00Worldbuilding Wednesday: Twelve Domains <i style="background-color: white;">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.</i><br />
<br />
<i>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. </i><br />
<br />
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.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
Travelers to worlds other than their own are subject to that world's Constants with two exceptions: first, they carry with them a broken version of one of their home Domain's Constants. Werewolves, for example, are beings that hail from that universe where matter reflects the mind, and while they appear to be human each one also has an alternate form which most closely approximates their usual form in their home domain, but filtered through the lens of this world (Most werewolves turn into wolves, hence their name, but wolves do not exist in their world and are merely the closest thing, symbolically, to what they usually look like in their world. A werewolf and a werejaguar are the exact same kind of being, but operating in different cultures in different places of the world).<br />
<br />
Second, all people, including travelers, can only be killed by their own Domain. Humans are pretty easy to kill but only because we're in our own Domain. Put us in the Domain that werewolves come from and we'll be as hard to kill as a werewolf is here. Which is to say, we'll only be killable by something from our Domain or touched by our Domain. Now, this does mean that travelers from other Domains can't kill us with their bare hands (Even disemboweled, you'll still survive and eventually heal if the act was done without anything that was connected to your Domain) but it is kind of easy to just pick up a knife and stab something with it. There are also some exceptions: Werewolves, <i>while transformed</i>, are touched just enough by the Domain to kill people, but also touched enough to be killed by things from our Domain if you put enough effort into it (they can lose limbs and keep going).<br />
<br />
There are sometimes other beings that are permanently touched by a second Domain and are also in this "can be killed by either Domain but only if you hurt them a lot" category, which is sometimes better than being solely of one Domain. It is easier for people of the other Domain to hurt you, yeah, but a traveler <i>normally </i>dies as easily as a human in this Domain if you're using something that has been touched by its Domain. If vampires exist then they are usually creatures that are native to one Domain or another but have been infected by another kind of creature that comes from one Domain in particular.<br />
<br />
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All magic is ritual magic. It takes awhile to perform and works by drawing one or more Constants from one or more other Domains and temporarily or permanently imbuing those Constants in something. Sometimes it's a living thing, but more often it is an item or a location. Incidentally, anything that is imbued by a Constant can now be used to kill something from the Domain that possesses that Constant, for as long as the magic sticks.<br />
<br />
Earth's four Constants are Absence, Dead Matter, Entropy, and Variety.<br />
<br />
<i>Absence: </i>In other Domains coldness and darkness are distinct forces in their own right rather than the lack of heat or light. Our Domain is the only one where forces have absences opposing them rather than things that are forces themselves.<br />
<br />
<i>Dead Matter: </i>Nonliving things aren't alive in our Domain. Obviously. In other Domains, though, spirits are possessed by everything from rocks to countries, though they operate on a different scale than we do and generally only have an indirect influence on us. Travelers from other Domains feel like they've walked into a desert when they come here, and travelers from Earth sometimes feel like they're almost suffocating on the density of sheer life that exists in other Domains.<br />
<br />
I am also bouncing around the idea that organizations and such, being alive, also need fuel of a sort. It is chiefly due to the influence of travelers of other Domains that we have practices like sacrificing people each year to keep the empire healthy. In other Domains you really do need sacrifices (though not always that kind_ in order to keep the country, or the city, or the family thriving (leaving out milk for the domovoi is the kind of sacrifice that you might make to the family spirit).<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Entropy: </i>In other Domains, systems do not tend toward disorganization and decay. Lots of things still need fuel, like suns and living organisms, but they don't fall apart of their own accord. Ours is the only Domain where things rust (normally), people get old, and the natural tendency of systems is to get chaotic and confused. This also happens to justify the existence of things like really-awesomely well-kept scavenger tech and really, really old organizations in other Domains, since they don't just fall apart for no other reason than "things break down when they get old."<br />
<br />
<i>Variety: </i>Things in our Domain get really complicated and different. Blue has more shades, people aren't as simple, &c. This may be related to our Domain's tendency toward chaos, but is definitely its own Constant. Travelers from other Domains get thrown out of whack when they come to Earth because all of a sudden they are dealing with a lot more (especially emotionally and psychologically) than they ever were before. In other Domains people are easier to fit into little boxes and have less baggage. They fit into roles and archetypes, although this hardly means that everybody acts the same, even in those particular roles. This also happens to justify our world's superiority in the "Who has thousands and thousands of distinct cultures?" competition.<br />
<br />
If this all sounds kind of dismal except for the fourth one, then don't worry, the rest of the Domains agree. It wouldn't be wrong to describe Earth as a kind of Hades or Niflheim or Pale Land, maybe even Hell, so far as everybody else is concerned. It's empty, it's scary, it does stuff to your mind, and <i>it is eating you </i>(insofar as you now start to get old).<br />
<br />
Also, there is something called "crossover phenomena." Weird stuff happens when you get the influence of one Domain mixing in with another. Rust, for example, becomes a disease of sorts when it is brought into other Domains. Rust spreads in other Domains; sometimes, even living organisms can be "infected" by rust. This is especially bad since not only are you, well, slowly disintegrating into red metallic dust stuff (which, by the way, is still infectious) but the only way to "kill" it is through electricity or fire. And both of those <i>hurt</i>.<br />
<br />
Domains... Domains... What are they? Let's map them to the Chinese Zodiac. First off, twelve signs are organized into four "trines" so let's carry that over and say that each of the Domains connects more easily to two other Domains.<br />
<br />
Let's map Earth to "Rat" (how things break down and are just plain dead here). The other two Domains in our trine are Dragon and Monkey, whatever those turn out to be like. </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.542857142857143; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br /></div>
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Creative Commons License" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a><br />
This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-37298886955884295662015-05-20T17:30:00.000-07:002016-01-31T17:26:37.428-08:00Worldbuilding Wednesday: Basement!Narnia<div style="background-color: white;">
<i>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.</i></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<i><br /></i>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. </div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br />
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 <i>Narnia </i>crossed with <i>House of Leaves </i>and <i>Neverwhere </i>crossed with <i>City of Angles</i>.<br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br />
There's this whole world down there, with cultures and beings that have adapted to this environment. The deeper that you go, the more that you undergo a time dilation effect to get that Narnia time effect. If 1.1 seconds pass in the level below you for every second that passes on your level, then 3.8 hours would pass one hundred levels down for every second that passed in the first, "real world" level and 37.75 <i>years </i>would pass by for every day you spent in the surface world. If the building is sixty years old and the Basement World has been here for that whole time, then 826,725 years have passed at the bottom. </div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br />
The time dilation will probably play some tricks with the light though. I should keep that in mind. </div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br />
There are pipes and electricity and such, but the building doesn't have an atrocious utilities bill because the water and electricity is coming from <i>below</i>. In fact, the building has a surprisingly low utilities bill, because it's leeching off of the resources below. Kadmij of reddit suggested modeling the system after a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel's_Horn" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Gabriel's Horn</a>, so we'll see how that goes. How exactly it works will probably never be figured out, but there will still be ways to make use of This Thing That We Don't Understand. </div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br />
"Down" is good and "Up" is bad. There are bad things Up Above-- let's call them ghouls. I'm leaning toward the idea that some mad wizard made the building or at least is responsible for the Basement World but when said wizard went to reach the bottom-most level something went wrong and ze never got there. Maybe there was a whole group of them that went down, and yada yada, they bred (they refused to go back up until they'd gotten to the bottom, or maybe they <i>couldn't</i>) and now you've got ghouls. </div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br />
We'll get back to ghouls in a moment. What <i>else</i> is living down here? Things that would be considered pests, for one. Rats. Spiders. Not sure how very many bats would get down here, so let's leave them out of this even though they've been in a number of Magical Underground World stories. Cats? Maybe. Snakes? Lizards? Also maybe. But the rats are the most important ones, because they're the ones with dexterity in their paws. The cats might be polydactyl though, so they'd also be useful. Regardless, for now we will be referring to the lot of them as rats.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br />
But how are they intelligent? And how do they communicate? Maybe both of these can be answered with the idea: Magic. Specifically, there's some sort of magic that's affecting the mind. Or the Basement World <i>has</i> a mind, and when you are in the Basement World you are connected to it. The thinking beings here are sort of... running on the Basement Mind's hardware, and they are able to communicate telepathically with each other because to some extent they are islands of consciousness rising out of the same extended sea of subconscious mind. </div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br />
The rats and such are getting an intelligence boost because of this connection. <i>So are the ghouls</i>. The boost gets smaller as brain size scales up (and maybe it has to be a centralized nervous system for maximum efficiency, so spiders are only as intelligent as, say, surface world dogs or something like that) so ghouls are not quite to humans as humans are to rats, despite the rats having human intelligence. They are still incredibly intelligent, however. They live in the higher levels (let's say that their domain goes down to and includes the twenty-fifth level), and the only reason that the rats have been able to hold off the ghouls is because they have such a time advantage. If it takes a group of ghouls a day to organize an assault or to devise a plan then the rats down on the one hundredth level (which may be the very bottom) have three and a half years of planning themselves. </div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br />
<i>And the rats are still only barely hanging on</i>. </div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br />
It doesn't help that a brown rat is less than a foot long, sans tail, and even if ghouls have stunted growth they're still at least four times that size; the ghouls aren't just smart, they're also really big. But then, our main protagonist is a human. So she's big too. That should help. </div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br />
Speaking of which, this setting is just right for making <a href="http://girls-underground.com/the-archetype/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">a Girl Underground story</a>, with bonus points for literalness.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
Anyway, however she ends up getting down there, her arrival is seen as a demonic incursion. Besides the fact that she doesn't look too different from a ghoul, she's coming from Above. I'm thinking about her being called the High Queen, which is very Narnia but in the symbolism of the rats below it's akin to calling someone the Antichrist. And so she shall be. Forget the ghouls. They might be a problem but they won't be the biggest problem, even though they might look it at first. Our protagonist is going to eventually going to play a subversive role in the society of the Basement World, flipping the present social order over on its head. Hopefully we can keep this from going Dances with Rats or Mighty Humie if this isn't presented as an unambiguous good. To at least some points of view, she's really going to live up to being an Antichrist equivalent. </div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
Anyhow, as the High Queen, as some sort of demon, the first friends that she makes are going to be very strange. The Basement World's versions of demon-worshipers and diabolists, most likely. What do you do when you want to save the galaxy but the Jedi want to kill you and only the Sith will be your friends?</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
If the Basement World is responsible for making the rats intelligent then they can't stay so outside of it. If our protagonist has to retreat to the surface for a time and brings any of her friends with her then she's going to have a very sad time.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
The Basement World is a freaking <i>maze</i>. There is a reason that the ghouls' ancestors were able to get lost down here on their way to the bottom. Maybe... Maybe the Basement World doesn't want them there. Or something like that. But by the time that they were able to descend very far, the rats had already become sapient. Or maybe the Basement World didn't push them to defend against the ghouls, they just did that of their own volition because they didn't want to give up what they had and the ghouls hadn't put on a particularly nice show to begin with.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
As you descend the levels, things get weirder. The Basement World becomes more of a living organism. The carpet turns into a fungus, at first something thin and moss-like but in the lowest levels so thick and tall that you have mushroom jungles (at least from the small perspectives of the rats). The walls slowly heal after being damaged, so tunnels in the deeper levels have to be constantly maintained, and maybe the pipes seem to be <i>arteries</i> and run with something like blood instead of water. Maybe there are also table trees that grow chair fruits or something.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
Glass people. Or at least living glass of some sort. Glass that grows, whether it's intelligent or just a resource.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
The rats are tapping into the electrical lines of the Basement World but they also use steam power. Electricity is much harder for them to work with but often worth it.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
The stairways are heavily defended. The rats can travel through tunnels and vents too but the ghouls can only go through the stairways because they're so big. Each stairway is like a fortress, and whenever there is an attack the very first thing that the guards do is send a message down to the lower levels. Sometimes the rats send expeditions to contested levels in an attempt to push back the ghouls. These are always dangerous affairs and often end in disaster because the ghouls are so much bigger and so much more intelligent, but they are necessary in order to try to maintain breathing space.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
The ghouls can communicate telepathically like everyone else. They might also have their own language for the purpose of speaking without the rats understanding, if telepathy is broadcast-style. The protagonist is not super-smart, by the way, because the process of fully adapting to the call of the Basement Mind is something that takes place over generations.</div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
Ants are a thing. About as intelligent as dogs, and used as pack animals. An ant can carry 500 milligrams, and your average iron nail is 1-1.5 grams (speaking of which, iron nails should also grow from stuff). An individual ant may not be able to carry much, but imagine a whole convoy of them going single-file through the tunnels, from one level to another, carrying a respectable amount of iron between them. Or food-- the equivalent of a whole loaf of bread could be carried by a thousand ants without a problem. I wonder how big the rats could breed their ants before you got diminishing returns on carrying capacity. The ants might also be used in the cultivation of the fungal fields. </div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br />
Yeah. I think that I've got something here. </div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<br />
<b>A few extra figures: </b></div>
<ul style="background-color: white;">
<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><b>Time (Levels 5/10/15/25): </b>Assuming previous figures, for every second that passes in the first level, 1.6 seconds, 2.6 seconds, 4.2 seconds, and 10.8 seconds pass in the fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and twenty-fifth levels respectively. For every day that passes in the first level, a day and a half, almost two days, half a week, and almost two weeks pass in the fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and twenty-fifth levels respectively. For every year that passes in the first level, one and a half years, two and a half years, four years, and almost eleven years pass in the fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and twenty-fifth levels respectively. Since the Basement World was created (with the building of the apartment above it) sixty years ago, time has passed as follows: ninety-six years, 155 years, 250, and 650 years have passed in the fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and twenty-fifth levels respectively. </li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;"><b>Size (Levels 25/100): </b>If the basement is 25 feet by 100 feet (based on a tenement building) for a total area of 2,500 square feet, and the square footage of each level is 1.05 times greater than the one above it, then the one hundredth level is 328,753 square feet, or approximately 62 square miles. The size of each level increases so that the twenty-fifth level is about 8,466 square feet, or 1.6 square miles.</li>
</ul>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<b>Questions to answer: </b></div>
<div style="background-color: white;">
<ul>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;">What is rat culture like? How has the generations-long siege mentality shaped the culture? </li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;">Does the maze change at all? Do the walls move?</li>
<li style="margin-left: 15px;">How long do rats live?</li>
</ul>
</div>
<ul>
</ul>
<br />
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This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-67710447957885413402015-05-14T17:30:00.000-07:002015-05-14T19:37:54.284-07:00Things That I Like: 3 Ways to Use Dragons<ol style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; margin: 0px 0px 24px 1.5em; padding: 0px;">
<li><strong style="color: black;">Dragons built civilization (kind of by accident)</strong></li>
</ol>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Pretend for a moment that you’re a dragon. You have a hoard. You want to keep it protected, but you would like to grow it too and you can’t be <em style="border: none; color: inherit;">over there</em>, getting loot, if you’re <em style="border: none; color: inherit;">over here</em>, protecting the loot that you’ve got.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Lucky for you, there’s no need to choose. Those half-hairless bipeds you’ve noshed on now and again might try to sneak into your hoard every now and then, but maybe they could be trained.<br />
<a name='more'></a></div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Dragons have their own civilization (of a sort; we wouldn’t easily recognize it as such) but they didn’t intentionally replicate that in humans in the organization of their “hoard-keeps.” It simply grew around them. Writing and mathematics developed in order to keep better records of a hoard’s contents. A technological arms race was the product of struggles between tribes and clans, all trying to protect their patron’s hoard and seize the hoards of others.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
The system became so successful that small bureaucracies began to emerge in order to manage all of the various tasks required by the hoard-keep. Having a dragon around is a good deterrent against raiders, too, so there’s another incentive to align yourself with a dragon. </div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Even today, dragon-run empires are effectively vast hoard-keeps. The national treasury and the dragon’s hoard are one and the same, and when the empire extends its holdings and establishes colonies it does so in order to add greater glory to the name of its dragon.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
There are a few ways that this can go, none of them contradictory with any others:</div>
<ul style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; list-style: square; margin: 0px 0px 24px 1.5em; padding: 0px;">
<li>Dragons may be cooperative in this and age, and nations are ruled or run by multiple dragons at one or more levels.</li>
<li>Dragons may be capable of breeding with humans, and their children are likewise fertile. Perhaps dragons simply fill the middle ranks with their descendants but are still active forces themselves. Perhaps dragons don’t care what’s done so long as the trains run on time (are there trains in this world?) and the effective head of state is a descendant of the dragon. Indeed, that might be the difference between nobles and commoners.</li>
<li>Going a little further on that idea, <em style="border: none; color: inherit;">Dungeons and Dragons</em> isn’t the only place where you find dragon-descended humans having magic powers thanks to their ancestry. Perhaps this is the source of all magical ability. Speaking of which, what if dragons were able to magic to great effect but only in certain ways, while their half-breed descendants are not as powerful but can turn their small amount of magic to a number of ends?</li>
</ul>
<ol start="2" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; margin: 0px 0px 24px 1.5em; padding: 0px;">
<li><strong style="color: black;">A generational story centering on a dragon</strong></li>
</ol>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
We can run with this idea even if we assume that civilization arose more or less normally. Let’s push the date of the Bright Idea further into the future.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Imagine a story, told over generations, that starts with a few people that have been approached to protect a dragon’s hoard. Perhaps the dragon has made a cost/benefit analysis and decided that what it pays them will be a smaller loss than if there were no one to protect the hoard. Or maybe there’s something that people really like and dragons care little or nothing for. If dragons have valuable bodily substances (we’ll get to that next week) then maybe it bleeds itself or milks its venom on a regular basis for them.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Regardless of how it gets started, it goes on. The years pass and a secret society forms around the hoard. You don’t want to make this a matter of public knowledge if you can avoid it, after all. You want to help your fellow hoard-keepers in day-to-day life while you’re at it, too. And having a series of initiation levels will help you sift wheat from chaff and discover who can be trusted.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Imagine that the treasure of the Freemasons and the Knights Templar was a dragon’s hoard (and also not fake) and you might have the general idea.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Eventually, in process of time, the secret society transforms further. Perhaps it insinuates itself into society so thoroughly that it effectively takes control. Perhaps it becomes a religion, secret or otherwise.</div>
<ol start="3" style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; margin: 0px 0px 24px 1.5em; padding: 0px;">
<li><strong style="color: black;">A generational story from the <em style="border: none; color: inherit;">point of view</em> of a dragon</strong></li>
</ol>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Alternately, why don’t we forgo the humans entirely? We’ll get rid of the whole process of characters dying and being replaced by others, too. Instead, our story, still being told over a period of centuries, has a single protagonist: the dragon itself.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
Start with the durg is born, or hatched, or whatever you want to call it. From youth to extreme old age we follow the dragon. History moves, the times change, and the world becomes ever more different. Once no bigger than a thumb or a hand, the story goes on until our dragon is as big as a mountain and has to retreat into the bones of the world or the depths of the sea.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
And what would <em style="border: none; color: inherit;">that</em> be like, if the story continued for a little bit more? I want to know what civilizations exist beneath the waves. At the very least there must be dragons, great big ones that hibernate for years and have lived for millennia, and the kind of society that would develop under those circumstances.</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
By the way, does that proposed life cycle make dragons out to be like great big fire-breathing sea turtles?</div>
<div style="color: #444444; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; margin-bottom: 24px;">
<em style="border: none; color: inherit;">R. Donald James Gauvreau works an assortment of odd jobs, most involving batteries. He has recently finished a guide to comparative mythology for worldbuilders, available <a data-mce-href="http://www.mediafire.com/view/kz4dv41ud9fcbdk/Brother_G's_Cyclopedia_of_Comparative_Mythology.pdf" href="http://www.mediafire.com/view/kz4dv41ud9fcbdk/Brother_G's_Cyclopedia_of_Comparative_Mythology.pdf" style="color: #743399;">here</a>for free. He also maintains a blog at <a data-mce-href="http://whitemarbleblock.blogspot.com/" href="http://whitemarbleblock.blogspot.com/" style="color: #743399;">White Marble Block</a>, where he regularly posts story ideas and free fiction, and writes <a data-mce-href="http://www.rpg.net/columns/list-column.phtml?colname=theculturecolumn" href="http://www.rpg.net/columns/list-column.phtml?colname=theculturecolumn" style="color: #743399;">The Culture Column</a>, an RPG.net column with cultures ready for you to drop into your setting. </em></div>
Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-61354389965388772322015-05-13T17:30:00.000-07:002015-09-01T13:52:35.072-07:00Worldbuilding Wednesday: Alien Gods<i style="background-color: white;">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.</i><br />
<br />
If our beliefs produced gods, then do alien species have gods? This is a sort of Far Future <i>Scion </i>or <i>American Gods</i> kind of story, I suppose. It's about taking a not-uncommon premise from contemporary fantasy and melding it with science fiction.<br />
<br />
So, let's do this.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
The gods (by which we shall refer to any divinity at all) are repeatedly reincarnated. The timing and placement of said births depends on the strength and (geographical) concentration of faith focused on a given god. Gods do not know their nature at first but they may be awakened to it through a suitable trigger event that is based on that god (so St. Christopher would require a different trigger event than Krishna or Huehuecoyotl). A greater "push" is required to awaken a god that is not the focus of as much faith, and memories of past lives slowly soak into the god after an awakening until the god's current life is swallowed up in the gestalt of previous lives.<br />
<br />
Some force or other effect is required for the awakening process. This force waxes and wanes around our world over time, but the aliens' world had no such situation. Their gods steadily progressed into a position of open rulership, whereas our pantheons would begin to be wiped out whenever awakenings ceased.<br />
<br />
Eastern Asia is in a position to dominate the world because of the relative strength of its pantheons. There are a few angels and saints running around as well.<br />
<br />
Ragnarok is a muddled recollection of events already past, which were later considered to be in the future, and most or all of the Norse divinities were killed in some manner which prevented reincarnation. Other gods have sometimes died in a similar manner but only rarely.<br />
<br />
The aliens and their gods still work closely together and the invasion is heavily reliant on the powers of their gods. The aliens have taken advantage of the mechanics of godhood in some way. Earth's gods will need to rally their mortals in order to successfully defend against the invasion.<br />
<br />
Do the aliens's gods want more worshipers? Is that why they are invading? Is this a sort of extraterrestrial "conversion by the sword" thing? Belief probably doesn't actually strengthen a god, at least after a god has awoken. Rather, it makes awakenings in general more common. Did the powers of the alien gods make FTL simple enough that they have the ability to travel from world to world but not to terraform, so they are looking for living space?<br />
<br />
The pantheon of the aliens has become more or less unified over time. There are two sun gods and perhaps as many as three moon gods, mirroring the double suns and triple moons of the aliens' homeworld.<br />
<br />
The powers of the gods are things that we would be able to label as "psychic." Not so much (or at all) on the bodily transformation end or anything like that, but there is telepathy, maybe probability-based precognition, remote viewing, telekinesis of various kinds, mental projection, mind control, maybe even something as far as bending space.<br />
<br />
Some awakenings have happened already by the time of the invasion. For the story, maybe the invasion is already in progress. The aliens are fighting strangely because they are trying to take prisoners as often as possible. They are minimizing casualties all around, on their side and on ours. Assuming, of course, that they're trying to grab worshipers and suchlike.<br />
<br />
But why not just clone new worshipers by the thousands, either of their own species or of ours after we have all been killed off? The answer is the same as it would be if they were looking for living space: they don't have the technology for it. They have sufficient numbers of gods who can bend space that they can go from one world to another, but they have not been operating for long enough to, for example, figure out effective cloning.<br />
<br />
There is a reason that they are looking for worshipers besides raw power, though. Even as the population grows there are still more gods being created by the aliens as time goes on. At one point the various gods tried to kill each other permanently in order to clear the field but nobody does that anymore (at least for the actual purpose of reducing the number of gods around; it might still be done as a punishment or something). And so there are more and more gods with every generation, even as the overall population expands.<br />
<br />
The aliens are not afraid of dying, you see. Those of them that are gods already will certainly be reborn, and those who are not yet gods will have tales spun of them that will inspire worship, if only they do a good job of serving the existing gods. But gods do not have faith, so as you have more gods there is less faith to go around, which makes it harder for awaken any particular god.<br />
<br />
The solution is to get believers whose gods will not be of their species. You will stamp our their faith in their own gods and so, for generations without end, they will continue to fuel the awakenings and re-awakenings of your own people. It is the doctrine of the gods of these aliens that eventually all of their people will be made into gods, and only gods will be born to them, but for this to happen they need an empire of beings who are not their own species.<br />
<br />
Just for funsies: gods taste different than non-gods, at least to gods. So ritual cannibalism is a Big Thing for the alien gods, and also you get some horrible scenes of alien gods eating some of our protagonists and whatever.<br />
<br />
Which means that the aliens eat meat. They're predatory. They're like wolves and octopi and wasps blended together. Their wings are vestigial, for threat displays. They have extended mouths, like if elephants kept their mouths on their trunks. Also, multiple mouths, each on a different spider-octopus-like limb. Maybe the wings are capable of all sorts of fine communication, so that the aliens have a sign language based on wing movement. Maybe their "fingers" are pedipalp-like things that were first used to grab food and direct it to a nearby mouth but now have much more dexterity.<br />
<br />
<b>Questions to answer: </b><br />
<ul>
<li>How do you kill a god in such a way that it does not ever come back? That is, how did Ragnarok happen? Learning how to do this will probably be critical to winning the war. </li>
</ul>
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Creative Commons License" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a><br />
This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-36702780736502470652015-05-12T17:30:00.000-07:002015-09-01T13:52:08.698-07:00Guest Post: The Cyclops EddaWritten by Shishi Nouti, taking inspiration from the random generator at the back of the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22552093-cyclopedia-of-comparative-mythology">Cyclopedia of Comparative Mythology</a>. Shishi Nouti has been kind enough to release this piece of mythology into the Creative Commons.<br />
<br />
<b>Skiftjana, Sleep Mother, Demigoddess of Dreams</b><br />
<br />
Likened to fire, which can warm or burn, she brings dreams good and bad, of love or of hate. (A secondary association stems from fire's importance in keeping warm at night). Also associated with mental illness, particularly of the bipolar or schizoid type, due to her association with the irreality of dreams and their fluctuating nature.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
She is portrayed as a monstrous green lizard, with one eye but many fire-spewing breasts, with which she feeds the minds of sleepers everywhere.<br />
<br />
Her symbol is the bellows, which fan the flames. Hence she is the consort of Stedjana, the Life Mother, demigoddess of the hearth, life, family, children, nourishment, and thus (perhaps influenced by her association with Skiftjana) mundane matters, sanity, waking life.<br />
<br />
As an offering, it is customary to offer a baby bottle filled with borax to the fire, or a pillow-sack full of flour.<br />
<br />
It is said the two once lived as a pair of identical twins (sister-lovers), in isolation in the virgin woods of the dawn of time. Motherless, the twins had simultaneously given birth to each other. As children, they were perfect mirrors, indistinguishable. At times they weren't sure they were not the same person.<br />
<br />
However, as they grew older, they started to develop differences in appearance and personality, Stedjana remaining mostly unchanged, while Skiftjana seemed at times more fair than her sister, at times more plain. Seeing every minute change magnified in contrast to her sister's stasis, Skiftjana grew more and more volatile. The more she tried to mirror her sister, searching for the primal bond that was their birthright, the more she seemed a grotesque parody, at times she emulating her, at times mocking her. In her efforts, however, she came to understand her sister more than unthinking Stedjana understood herself. Likewise, however little she showed it, Stedjana could not help but be influenced by her sister's manic portrayals.<br />
<br />
Stedjana longed to be a mother, and became pregnant. Skiftjana carried a flour-sack in her belly, spilling out some flour when Stedjana had morning sickness, and gradually filling it as Stedjana's pregnancy progressed. When Stedjana gave birth to Sufneter, a baby boy, Skiftjana huffed out a dough child, Skotu, which she replaced Sufneter with. Stedjana was heart-broken, and begged Skiftjana to give her back her child, but in her madness Skiftjana, believing herself and Stedjana to be the same person, believed herself to be the child's mother, too. Finally, they agreed to share both children, spending half the day with each, until Skotu and Sufneter had grown into men. Much of significance happened during those years, and much thereafter, but alas, the tale of their lives and deeds shall be told elsewhere.<br />
<br />
After the twin boys had left home, Stedjana fell ill, and was on the verge of death. Skiftjana, as always, mirrored her every ailment and convulsion. Instead of the grotesque parody it had been before, her portrayal of Stedjana seemed almost compassionate, as if she were willing to suffer and die alongside her. As, indeed, she did, both sisters giving up ghost of one breath, and awakening of the same breath into godhood.<br />
<br />
Such goes the tale of the Twice Twin Mothers*, may they show their mercy while asleep or while awake.<br />
<br />
--<br />
* Twins and mothers of twins, evidently not taking into account that they're their own mothers.<br />
<br />
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This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.
Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-87815084228503401472015-05-04T17:30:00.000-07:002015-06-04T14:44:34.486-07:00FICTION: Tin Roof Reminiscence <b>Tin Roof Reminiscence</b><br />
<br />
You love the sound of rain falling on a tin roof. The rain is brought by clouds. The clouds, more often than not, bring the murk with them and overshadow the world. And in the shadow you can see. You can smell. You can feel.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
And the sound of the rain brings back such strong memories, as fresh to you as if they were of yesterday’s events. You remember chasing after the Game, and the sound of their footfall on concrete and grass as you pursued them. The pleasure that came with their fear as they struggled to see through the downpour that was around them.<br />
<br />
Two of them went to ground in a place like this one, with an old tin roof over the porch. Their ramshackle, an abandoned place where they could live and hide. But they found it hard to hear you over the rain. They could not see you, either. You held back far enough that the heavy rain masked your presence.<br />
<br />
You could track them by the richness of their scent, the texture that their fear gave to it. You were never in any danger of losing them, not even in the rain. No, not when whole world around you was being given such color and every sound was made a symphony.<br />
<br />
And then they and you came upon their hideout. You quickened your pace and shed all intentions of stealth so that they would hear your claws on the pavement. You shrieked for them, all so that they would know and their fear would become that much greater.<br />
<br />
You came down upon them between the steps and the front door. You crippled one, slicing the hamstrings of its legs so that it could not walk and then you struck the other. In a single movement you impaled it with the claws of your killing hand, sticking it to the short wooden railing.<br />
<br />
You should have waited. You had found the place where they took shelter in the night. You should have called upon the rest of your band and waited until their kin had also come here, but you were so hungry. You were selfish. You could have waited but you wanted them <i>now</i> (you wanted them the two of them to yourself).<br />
<br />
And so you did. Slowly, savoring every moment of it, you ate them both, and their fear gave such a wonderful essence to the sound of their screaming and the pitter-patter of the water-drops that were falling all about you.<br />
<br />
You love the sound of rain falling on a tin roof. Oh, the memories that it brings back to you...<br />
<br />
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Creative Commons License" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a><br />
This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-16795195809716861102015-04-27T17:30:00.000-07:002015-06-04T14:44:48.581-07:00FICTION: Redeeming Blood<div style="background-color: white; border-radius: 0px !important; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.42857142857143em; margin-bottom: 0.357142857142857em; margin-top: 0.357142857142857em; padding: 0px;">
<span style="border-radius: 0px !important; font-style: inherit; font-weight: 600; margin: 0px;"><b>Redeeming Blood</b></span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; border-radius: 0px !important; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.42857142857143em; margin-bottom: 0.357142857142857em; margin-top: 0.357142857142857em; padding: 0px;">
<br />
The gun pressed up against Nicholas Romanian’s head, pushing it against the ground. “I crippled the last Green Man,” the gun’s wielder said. “But I never was able to kill him.”</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border-radius: 0px !important; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.42857142857143em; margin-bottom: 0.357142857142857em; margin-top: 0.357142857142857em; padding: 0px;">
<br />
“Do your worst.”</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border-radius: 0px !important; color: #222222; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.42857142857143em; margin-bottom: 0.357142857142857em; margin-top: 0.357142857142857em; padding: 0px;">
<br />
Winter Wolf paused. “You can’t imagine what my worst is. “ The villain sighed. “I had been hoping for a good game, you know. One last hurrah from out of my retirement. And instead you give me this piece of shit barroom brawl. I was looking for a cataclysm, kid. The wrath of God raining down on me, and I get you, instead.”<br />
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The man stood up and kicked Romanian in the stomach. Romanian doubled up on himself, groaning. “What was his idea, passing on his Mantle to a spineless brat like you? I thought he was biding his time for all of these years. Waiting for somebody worthy to pick up the legacy.” Winter Wolf kicked him again. “And instead I get <i>you</i>." </div>
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Romanian didn’t know it either. Even now, with access to impressions and fragments of personality that had been passed on from the previous bearers of the Green Man’s Mantle, Romanian wasn’t sure what the old man had seen in him.</div>
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“I…” Romanian struggled to say. “I win…”</div>
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Winter Wolf snorted. “My men should have thorns ripping up their bodies right now. There should be branches growing out of their throats. This building should be a slaughterhouse of green and red and what do I find instead? You’ve never killed a soul. You would have done it by now if you had the guts for it.” He crouched down beside Romanian. “I never dared to get this close to the Green Man. I knew what he would have done to me.”<br />
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It was true. Romanian had seen photos of it, and there were memories of it from previous Green Men. But the Mantle was not so old and they were not too strong. They were influences, nothing more. He could resist them.<br />
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He didn’t know why he de Hautdesert had passed the Mantle on to him, or why the Mantle itself had accepted him. But he knew—he was determined that it be so—that that part of him which added to the Mantle would only accept someone like himself. Someone who would rather die than commit murder.</div>
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There would be no more green killing fields.</div>
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“You still aren’t going to… kill the Green Man,” Romanian said after he recovered. “Just me. Someone else will pick it up. And someone after that. And we’ll get tougher every time. We won’t have to kill you to stop you.”</div>
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The villain regarded him with a different air this time. “I could keep you alive, you know. If you aren’t dead then you have to be there to pass it on. I could stop this silly dream of yours.” Winter Wolf put the gun against his head again. “But I accept your terms. Let’s play this game.”<br />
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Romanian died before his brain could register the gunshot.<br />
<br /></div>
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Creative Commons License" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png" style="border-width: 0px;" /></a><br />
This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a>.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-31103021395560351422015-03-23T17:30:00.000-07:002015-03-23T17:30:01.206-07:00Poetry: Cigarette GalleryThis poem originally appeared in the <a href="http://www.thelinnetswings.org/?pageno=3&id=10133#">Summer 2014 issue</a> of <i>The Linnet's Wings</i>.<br />
<br />
<b>Cigarette Gallery</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Stuck in a dank mausoleum<br />
Choking on the dust and ash<br />
All one with you, my love<br />
Missing you, my love<br />
<br />
I see the cards placed all around me<br />
Touching at older things, and brighter things,<br />
At memories with you, my love<br />
At the dead and the past, my love<br />
<br />
Soothing my nerves in nicotine yellow<br />
With the little fire enclosed inside my hand<br />
Feeling crumbling bones and distant clicking<br />
Decay growing within my lungs<br />
<br />
I see Death out of the corner of my eyes.<br />
I see smoke blowing out his nostrils.<br />
I see and I have peace and hope,<br />
Hope that we are reunited soon, in my slow suicide.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-80615330219512218192015-03-16T17:30:00.000-07:002015-03-16T17:30:00.857-07:00Poetry: Was the HuntThis poem originally appeared in the <a href="http://www.innersins.com/innersins_197.htm">Summer 2014 issue</a> of <i>Inner Sins</i>.<br />
<br />
<b>Was the Hunt</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Such sense of pursuit, and horrid fear<br />
Such stalking patience and hungry need<br />
They flee, they pounce, they shriek and they roar<br />
Together on a swirling table<br />
Keeper, reaper, again and again,<br />
Shadows caught against the wall like fire<br />
One hunting, and the other hunted<br />
But dead and trapped in that final chase<br />
Which had felled them both and mixed their minds:<br />
In final victory was the death;<br />
In pain of loss was still the triumph.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-11133969167703005912015-03-09T17:30:00.000-07:002015-03-09T17:30:00.418-07:00Poetry: Hali (Byself)This poem was previously published in the December 2014 issue of <i>Hello Horror</i>.<br />
<br />
<b>Hali (Byself)</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
A shoreless, boundless sea<br />
Kicked up by the cold storm<br />
Swallowing the ivory tower.<br />
<br />
A shoreless, boundless sea<br />
Hiding hunting serpents and<br />
Gaunt faces in the chaos<br />
Kicked up by the cold storm,<br />
An explosive transformation<br />
Beckoning the end of ages,<br />
Swallowing the ivory tower,<br />
The tower of Babel, our folly,<br />
To the sound of beating drums.<br />
<br />
In a house of mirrors the yellow king<br />
Harrows sixty-nine reflected tiers.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-62882820015928250362015-03-02T05:30:00.000-08:002015-03-02T05:30:00.331-08:00Poetry: Haunting Lonely PoolsThis poem was previously published in the <a href="http://www.innersins.com/innersins_212.htm">Fall 2014 issue</a> of <i>Inner Sins</i>.<br />
<br />
<b>Haunting Lonely Pools</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Now she is only herself, at best.<br />
She would have nothing, to have rest.<br />
<br />
A ghost of bones and rot, that wrought<br />
A life that would not, made naught.<br />
A demon of her loss and sorrow<br />
Who spies a path she cannot follow.<br />
<br />
Circling her forgotten, rotten body<br />
Which at the well, there fell and died.<br />
Forgetting, slowly, what life looks like:<br />
Crude beasts avoid the place, the house<br />
That no men walk near, long o'ergrown.<br />
The quiet leaves her cold to the bone.<br />
<br />
For fits and starts she thinks she thinks<br />
She surely might still be alive.<br />
But what that means, she can't recall<br />
Behind a solemn veil of tears.Callmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8188942656757231173.post-26375759083868943452015-02-23T17:30:00.000-08:002015-02-23T17:30:00.150-08:00Poetry: Behind the WallsThis poem was previously published in the Autumn 2014 issue of <i>Tales of the Talisman</i>.<br />
<br />
<b>Behind the Walls</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
there is something there unseen<br />
scratching and rustling behind the walls<br />
buzzing that roots itself behind my eyes<br />
<br />
it follows me it sometimes wanders<br />
stalking something behind the walls<br />
warded off by company but still heard distantly<br />
<br />
they do not cease they do not relent<br />
voices resolve from the noises behind the walls<br />
murmuring chants that echo through the house<br />
<br />
they now carry into my nightmares<br />
sounds suggesting colors made behind the walls<br />
twisting my perceptions to meet in alignment<br />
with the Presence lurking behind the wallsCallmesalticidaehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13295676800846037056noreply@blogger.com0