Worldbuilding Wednesday: Drug-free Dystopia

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

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

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

World: The Science Crusade

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

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

Worldbuilding Wednesday: Basement!Narnia

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

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

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

The Idea Emporium #1: A Few Notes on the Necronomicon

As promised, with the closing of The Culture Column has come the opening of a new column. The Idea Emporium is a grab bag of ideas. This month and the next I’ll supply some goodies on the Necronomicon. Other months might include new cultures, alien species, peculiar philosophies, or anything beyond or in-between.

As always, these are free for grabs and totally in the public domain from this point on. Use as you please, how you please.

A Brief History of the Necronomicon

"...pretiosissimum donum ab dis, id quod est esse, sed est novissime malum." Garamond Edition

“[it is] the most precious gift by the gods, that which is to be, but it is the last of all evil things.” Warren Rice Translation.

Things That I Like: 5 More Worlds and Cities

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

1. The Magic Dyson Sphere

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

Things That I Like: 4 Worlds and Cities

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

1. The Arcane City

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

Things That I Like: 4 Conflicts Between Order and Chaos

“In Michael Moorcock’s universe, a war is fought by two separate yet equally important groups: Law, which provides the fundamental capability of existence, and Chaos, which provides the ability for change and development. These are their stories.”

Awhile back I wrote a post with four moral dichotomies that were not so simple as “Good vs. Evil.” I mentioned that I would probably do an article specifically treating Order and Chaos and, what do you know, that day has come.

CYOA brainstorming: Troll

What is this about?

Domain: Ice
Shape: Gargoyle
Power source: Ehh...

Let's chop out the bit about how gargoyles are bound to a building. This thing isn't bound to a building, it is a building. This thing is as big as a cathedral, and when it turns to... ice in the light of day it is safe to enter.

And no power source either. None of them are really clicking with this "big building-monster thing" idea that we've got going on.

So it has a symbiotic relationship with a small group of people, I imagine. During the day, they take shelter in its icy organs and protect it from vandals and raiders. When the sun falls and it reanimates, the cathedral beast protects the people. Perhaps the people also feed it by leaving some of their food in its stomach before they depart for the night. 

Things That I Like: The Utopians: Theory, More Practice

In light of my earlier article on dystopias, I thought it would be appropriate to bring back an aborted setting that I worked on a long, long time ago. The premise was that there was a great conflict by a number of groups, called the Utopians, who were each genuinely trying to better everyone’s lives. But they disagreed on methods and they disagreed on ends. Even though they acknowledged that they were all trying to do a good job they couldn’t work together because each of the others sacrificed or didn’t address something which they considered to be of vital importance.

That’s what this is about, by demonstrating and giving examples.  Good Guys— or at least Decent Guys— who still can’t get along because they have such differing value systems, and the myriad ways that a utopia can take root.

Things That I Like: Beyond Good & Evil: 4 Moral Dichotomies

I like moral dichotomies and moral conflicts in settings. I even, on occasion, enjoy the epic struggle between Good and Neutral, or Candy and Chocolate. But when you have a conflict between the forces of Light and Darkness and they represent Good and Evil every time, well, I get a little exhausted by it. The next go-to option is little better. Order and Chaos? Nowadays that seems to be just as overplayed as Good and Evil. Sometimes even more— or worse, it’s supposedly about Order vs Chaos but these are just synonyms for Good and Evil.

Maybe one day I’ll write up a column about other ways to treat Order and Chaos in fiction (let me know below if that would interest you) but today I want to deal with moral dichotomies in general and present four Light/Dark dichotomies that are about a little something more.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Aegis Rising

Atmosphere: 3 out of 5. Neither good nor bad, it simply is, in this book. From the beginning you can just tell that this story is going to be a clear black-and-white conflict, which does well because, while I may dislike such conflicts most of the time, the story is still accurately conveying its nature, which I can only think well of. 

Characters: 3 out of 5. None of the characters are particularly bad, except maybe  the villains, who currently seem to be two-dimensional "safe" bad guys that won't make us ask complicated questions about questions. I like Mr. Scientist Villager, for all that he appears, and there's another character that I'm fond of who I can't mention above the Spoiler Line because, well, spoilers. 

Plot: 3 out of 5. I don't like how the revelations are artificially strung-out. "We'll tell you that later" or "Now is not the time for you to know" over and over again. It gets kind of grating. However, and I cannot stress this enough, there was no goshdarned love triangle madness. In fact, absolutely no badly-written romances shoehorned in solely to nab a few more readers, in any way whatsoever. This earns the book some points. The revelation of the villains' nature is also well-placed, being right about at the two-thirds point. 

Writing Style: 3 out of 5. The whole "elyrni" bit in the beginning should be replaced with alcohol or something similar. It felt like namedropping for the sake of namedropping, the way that it was structured. As well, "As we all know?"-style infodumping is probably a thing to be avoided. 

Worldbuilding: 1 out of 5. Unfortunately, I feel like there's a lot to be desired here. The names and words don't appear to share a common heritage, and many times seem better-suited for a Tolkienesque fantasy or, in other places, something Japanese. This culture of the village feels pretty Western for all that it's, you know, not supposed to be a bunch of White Folk. In general, it doesn't present me with something that I can believe in. 

Details, details: [here there be spoilers] 

Why does every hungry teen in unfamiliar circumstances inevitably reference back to some name brand product? 

From my notes: "Akol's language ability explanation is BS or he's lying." Got it! Or at least that's what it appears to be, since it turns out that these people have been sending out their Sentinels for generations, which would imply that some knowledge of non-local languages would be had through non-magic means. 

And how could you leave out Hexxus?
Now he's sad. 

Speaking of which: It's freaking magic, no matter how much you say otherwise, Valley Village People, unless we get an actual explanation. 

Tegan absolutely fails at probability estimates. When you can ping two pretty interesting coincidences between the prophecy and yourselves, and the natives have already demonstrated magic powers, you should probably go with the flow and assume that these people know what they're talking about. But then, she's a freaking teenager, not the Second Coming of Bayes. 

This is... kind of like Fern Gully sans Hexxus. The villains are Total Bad Guys, Inc., which I can't say that I really like. I hope that we get shown more depth in the villains in future books. 

Zombie water! Freaking zombie water! I do like that. Even if I'm slightly confused how the exact nature of the contaminating chemical is making it zombie water. 

The revelation about the Sentries explains a lot of stuff that was really, really bugging me.

Things That I Like: 8 Early Interaction Scenarios

This post originally appeared at The Oak Wheel on July 17th, 2014.

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Second Contact? Near-First Contact?

I don’t really know what the best term would be, but what we’re talking about is that time after the first contact has been made between two alien civilizations, but not so long after that they’re well-acclimated to each other. In other words, early enough that even the xenophiles are experiencing culture shock.

As before, humans can play either side of the field in the options presented.

Things That I Like: 8 First Contact Scenarios

This post originally appeared at The Oak Wheel on June 3rd, 2014.

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“Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy alien bastard. He was too good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river of uselessness for me not to like him— respect him, anyway. But then he found the cowboy trunk. It was two months’ rent to me and nothing but some squirrelly alien kitsch-fetish to Craphound.” Craphound, by Cory Doctorow.

The following First Contact scenarios can be used with humans on either side of the encounter. Don’t discount the possibility humans being the relatively more advanced civilization making contact, or both being at about the same level. Most of them can be combined with several others (consider how “missionary work” could be added to “information/signals only”).

Idea: Everyday Necromancy

There was talk somewhere on RPG.net about the concept of necromancy existing in the world, but being the only form of magic, and being as common as, say, brain surgery. I can’t recall anything else, but it seemed like something to run with, and I spun off from there.

Necromancy is the act of calling the spirits of the dead, and these spirits can be “free,” which is mentally taxing, though not impossible, or else “bound,” and placed in a physical container. While spirits can be placed in objects, they usually have no means of communication in this state (there are exceptions, such as via the television). A spirit bound in the physical world can be banished back with a necromancer’s touch (free spirits are intangible, but the necromancer holding them in this world need only stop spending the effort). Corpses, or even living things, may house spirits.

Idea: The Once and Misremembered King

Heroes have a tendency to be foretold by prophecy in fantasy stories. It sometimes seems to be few and far between that a hero worth his salt won’t have at least a single prophecy foretelling his coming or his return. But those prophecies can sometimes be centuries old, and we all know how accurately things get passed down through the ages, and that’s without considering the problems which arise when you’re translating from one language to another.

Fiction: A Legend of Creation

This story at Fictionpress.

After the Gods descended from the spires of the stars and made the world and all things that existed thereon, and in the depths thereof, They waited for a time in the midst of the world and observed the work which they had saw fit to form. And it came to pass that They saw many that began to grope forward toward the light of knowledge, and in the fullness of time it was to these that the Gods taught the gift of writing.

The Journeymen [D]

The Shifting Spirits

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

The Journeymen [C]

Magic

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

Idea: The Lizard People are not what you think [B]

Continued from Wednesday.

The reptoids of today are a miserable rabble compared to their illustrious forbears. They are scrambling. Their science has decayed over generations of imperfect transmission and many are looking for older records, hoping that we are advanced enough to finally reverse-engineer some of the more crucial principles and grant them either a way home or a weapon to secure their power here forever. We are interfertile, our two species, and the modern race of annunaki is more human than reptoid. The blood is thin, they think in ways and feel emotions foreign to their ancestors, and some are capable of only partial transformations. More and more are freaks, either trapped in a hybrid mishmash form or seemingly entirely without a trace of their starry heritage.

For the annunaki, the apocalypse came thousands of years ago.

The annunaki whisper to their children that they would have been worshiped as gods in the old order but they are impotent scions at best. The truth is that they would have no power, would be peons and footmen, so far have they degraded. And yet still they try to accomplish the dream of their ancestors, a second world order, now as the rising sun but modeled after the first of them all (and who knows what would happen if the old empire, still extant, came in contact with this world again).

And where would George fall into this? As his people have fallen, so has he. His alcoholism was real. His grief over his sister's death was real. Left to his own devices he would hold an anonymous life in a small town on no map. But his life was charted out for him no matter how he tried to drink himself away from it. Perhaps it was cowardly to go along in the end rather than reject it, but he couldn't follow his sister's path. Perhaps at least he could try to salvage something along the way.

And now he sits amid ruins, putting on a face for the world and his peers but secretly glad in a way that he failed to do all that they expected of him. He wonders how many of his peers are in his same position, dissatisfied but too afraid to do anything but follow orders- they've learned, and even the powerful ones know that they can't tear away from the group without reprisal. But they managed to ensure that unity too late in the game and a few of them decide to risk it anyway and sometimes even get away with it.

Meanwhile the bottle still calls to George, and he himself calls out at night to a God that he fervently wishes is real but knows could easily be just the persona of one of his own ancestors. It isn't a pretty life, but he never lied and told himself that he was strong enough to make it anything else.

Perhaps his grandchildren will live long enough to see the blood run out at last, and in that generation his bones will find rest as the plots of the annunaki finally crumble to a halt.

Idea: The Lizard People are not what you think [A]

I think that many men that have done bad things are men that were good men whose flaws overcame them. I don't think that every person that has done bad things would have gone down that road had they been able to foresee its end. Certainly, they at least don`t usually consider themselves bad men. Most people don't think themselves villains.

When I think of George W. Bush I think of a man who wanted to do the right thing (at least as he understood it) but failed, partly because he lost control over the situation (if you could say that he even had control once) and partly because his flaws got the better of him. Most people do end up that way, in that situation. Then you have David Icke, who thinks that Bush is descended from a lineage of shapeshifting blood-drinking reptilian aliens.

A part of me wonders: What if we`re both right? What if Dubya is a reptoid- but has lost control in a way that none of us hairless apes can imagine?

The reptilians know barely more than we do. There was a time when both of us were different from what we are now, but there was war in Heaven and we were the ones who lost. We found ourselves imprisoned, and then we forgot about everything. The reptoids were prison warders once, victors of the usurpation, but they either were betrayed by power-hungry underlings or were those rebellious underlings. Either way, they lost the second war and found themselves in the same prison that they had fashioned. And then their ancestors ran into a mad accident and were left, Robinson Crusoe-style, on this world, isolated from the galaxy-spanning empire that their fellows had created. Once usurpers in Heaven, they were now twice-fallen.

They don't have the industrial base to maintain or reproduce their technology, nor the numbers to maintain a stable breeding population, but they were able to act quickly enough to take control of the earliest city-states and install themselves as god-kings. They called themselves the annunaki. But a small cadre of castaway alien-demons does not a permanent occupying force make, and when they lost control they couldn't get it back. They've been trying for thousands of years to do so, and have occasionally gotten temporary footholds, but the job gets harder with every passing generation. Even when they were monarchs in Europe they couldn't take full advantage of the situation- they hide their nature and plans out of self-preservation rather than brotherhood and whenever they grow powerful enough  some turn on the rest and progress is lost again.

Continued on Friday.

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