Worldbuilding Summaries
Dec. 14th, 2018 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
contrarianarchonOkay, so the core settings I'm working on right now are:
- Four-Arts, which is urban fantasy without a masquerade. It's like the modern era, except in as much as it's changed by the four arts of magic (And probably a bit by the underlying physics being different; I haven't really explored what it means to be a scientist/physicist in this world); Conjury (the magic of summoning spirits and magical contracts), Aetheromancy (the magic of self-altering until you can perceive and manipulate environmental mana), Geomancy (the magic of ritualistically constructing items in ways which can influence destiny and the world) and Alchemy (The magic of putting chains on your soul; ideological commitments, and thereby gaining the power to make certain transformations on the self and the world.). Honestly, most of my work in this setting has gone into the metaphysics and social institutions directly relating to them (In particular, education, both modern and historical), rather than the more general geopolitics; the setting is a distorted "Real" world, in some ways. (Catholicism and Solomon both come up a lot in certain areas, but they're very different from IRL equivalents; Solomon is historically considered the greatest conjurer ever, and the spirits he summoned are one of the "Old Money" factions of the spirit realms, while Catholicism is much more deeply steeped in the idiosyncratic "Folk catholicism" traditions, with a lot more saint/angel worship)
- Rune-Carved, which is high-fantasy, originally created to explore the way a bunch of different cultures use/react to a single magic system. That magic system is a runic one; runes (technically, material differentials with curved geometric shapes) invoke various supernatural effects by "calling" "functions" "from" "the Universe". These functions can be simple, needing to be assembled into working arrays by complex patterns, or they can do nigh-incomprehensible effects all by themselves, depending on the precise runes used (Leading to a gradient between wild rune-masters who use unique and powerful runes with no theoretical basis, and academic runemasters, who use complex arrays of formal runes to produces relatively predictable and designable effects). The simplest runes can make light and heat; this alone defines civilization by being so much simpler than moving fuel from place to place.
The races, and their rough engagement with the magic system, are as follows:
- Humans (You've heard of these, I suspect), prepare - they use complex and often experimental runic arrays to create complex magic effects. Rituals, summons or constructs, and other great works are the domain of human runesmiths, and each city-state is defined by the great runic works they have secret knowledge of.
- The Monstra Nix are a hybrid of Elf and Dwarf; they are short and skinny and live deep underground. Their magic is one of bioengineering; warping life into more powerful and useful forms. They have the most advanced magic of any race, but it's very much a one-trick pony supporting the biowarping they do (They're also the default villains, due to their tendency to kidnap other races as feedstock).
- Archons are winged humans who worship the ideal of flight and the sun. Those of them who are sufficiently pure-blooded to fly under their own (Magical) power are the nobility, all others are peasants. They have a wide variety of magical forms of flight, and are known for using wands to lay runes on the fly, rather than pre-prepared artifacts like other factions.
- Naga are snake-people, nomadic apart from the well-hidden fortresses where they raise their children (Naga have a deep-seated instinct to protect children that is even more substantial and compulsive than the human equivalent). Their magic uses stacking runes, weak effects cast a thousand times, rather than a single strong effect. This results in peerless defensive structures, but is weak on active effects.
- Stoneborn are tall and strong (think D&D Goliaths); they live, for the most part in the southern jungles, in stone cities built over thousands of years. They scar themselves to build magic effects into their very flesh, and their shamans are the epitome of the wild rune-master, who knows a collection of simple and powerful effects accumulated over a long history, rather than a complex system for formulating new ones.
- The last race is the Collectors, who are much like giant preying mantises in general appearance. They trade nomadically. Unfortunately for them, the structure of their eyes makes them incapable of easily determining geometry, emphasizing instead motion and distance vision. This is generally a good trade-off, but it makes doing rune-magic nigh-impossible, so for them, rune-magic is a thing of carefully horded scrolls and artifacts, generally bought from humans or monstra nix.
- Elf-Fall, which is hard-sci-fi setting (if not actually rocketpunk, then certainly rocketpunk-adjacent), with what I consider a medium amount of transhumanism? It's a kinda weird setting, to be honest, since it's a bunch of different sub-ideas merged into one; a world where the greater part of earth is rendered uninhabitable or turned over to wildlife reserve as conventional society flees into arcologies and low-earth-orbit habitats, and the greater solar system grows strange and independent. Highlights include:
- The Ancient race of "Elves", which are a species native to mars. While powerful and possessed of advanced technology, they could not bring together the political unity to respond to the death of their planet, leaving only a few survivors (mostly rendered very far off from the "Native template" by various transhuman (transmartian? tranself?) alterations.) to survive into the modern day. The eponymous Elf-Fall was the decision of some of the few surviving factions to come out of stasis and try and join human society, much to the distress of all the humans who didn't expect a couple of thousand elder beings to try and come hang out.
- The fey-wilds, a sub-setting intended to contrast the survivors in the wastes against the fey-like arcology-dwellers. Presumes some weird sports amongst the arcology dwellers, WRT to feral-animal culling being an national sport, but otherwise quite plausible, and deeply amusing, to me.
- The Synthesis, a clade derived from a series of incredible unethical experiments in a Saturn-orbit colony. The people who made them thought they were making a better humanity, and refused to have any interactions with their erstwhile children, so as to not "taint" them with their own unethical actions. The Synthesis themselves are generally adapted for living in space, have broad enhancements to cognition and health, and a form of bio-wi-fi which allows for empathy, limited telepathy and the sharing of lucid dreams between members of the clade. (They also did quite a good job of absorbing optimism from old-fashioned sci-fi, and have quite a nice little post-scarcity society on the edge of known space).
- It's my dumping ground for spacer traditions, with heraldry and bells and gardens everywhere. The spacers in question are mostly holed up in the asteroid belt, but they are the mainstay of the industrial population within
- It also has my Venus setting! Which is a partially-teraformed place of vast balloon-cities, and of social tensions between the "City-folk" who just happen to live on Venus, and the genetically-engineered settlers, and the "Steeplejacks Guild" who use vast amounts of cybernetics and invasive surgery to be able to maintain the machinery which all civilization on the planet depends on.
I have others, but those three are the ones I'm mostly working on right now. Feel free to ask questions, etc etc. Now that I've got the basics down, when I catch myself ranting at myself about a world-building point, I might try typing it up and posting it instead.
- Four-Arts, which is urban fantasy without a masquerade. It's like the modern era, except in as much as it's changed by the four arts of magic (And probably a bit by the underlying physics being different; I haven't really explored what it means to be a scientist/physicist in this world); Conjury (the magic of summoning spirits and magical contracts), Aetheromancy (the magic of self-altering until you can perceive and manipulate environmental mana), Geomancy (the magic of ritualistically constructing items in ways which can influence destiny and the world) and Alchemy (The magic of putting chains on your soul; ideological commitments, and thereby gaining the power to make certain transformations on the self and the world.). Honestly, most of my work in this setting has gone into the metaphysics and social institutions directly relating to them (In particular, education, both modern and historical), rather than the more general geopolitics; the setting is a distorted "Real" world, in some ways. (Catholicism and Solomon both come up a lot in certain areas, but they're very different from IRL equivalents; Solomon is historically considered the greatest conjurer ever, and the spirits he summoned are one of the "Old Money" factions of the spirit realms, while Catholicism is much more deeply steeped in the idiosyncratic "Folk catholicism" traditions, with a lot more saint/angel worship)
- Rune-Carved, which is high-fantasy, originally created to explore the way a bunch of different cultures use/react to a single magic system. That magic system is a runic one; runes (technically, material differentials with curved geometric shapes) invoke various supernatural effects by "calling" "functions" "from" "the Universe". These functions can be simple, needing to be assembled into working arrays by complex patterns, or they can do nigh-incomprehensible effects all by themselves, depending on the precise runes used (Leading to a gradient between wild rune-masters who use unique and powerful runes with no theoretical basis, and academic runemasters, who use complex arrays of formal runes to produces relatively predictable and designable effects). The simplest runes can make light and heat; this alone defines civilization by being so much simpler than moving fuel from place to place.
The races, and their rough engagement with the magic system, are as follows:
- Humans (You've heard of these, I suspect), prepare - they use complex and often experimental runic arrays to create complex magic effects. Rituals, summons or constructs, and other great works are the domain of human runesmiths, and each city-state is defined by the great runic works they have secret knowledge of.
- The Monstra Nix are a hybrid of Elf and Dwarf; they are short and skinny and live deep underground. Their magic is one of bioengineering; warping life into more powerful and useful forms. They have the most advanced magic of any race, but it's very much a one-trick pony supporting the biowarping they do (They're also the default villains, due to their tendency to kidnap other races as feedstock).
- Archons are winged humans who worship the ideal of flight and the sun. Those of them who are sufficiently pure-blooded to fly under their own (Magical) power are the nobility, all others are peasants. They have a wide variety of magical forms of flight, and are known for using wands to lay runes on the fly, rather than pre-prepared artifacts like other factions.
- Naga are snake-people, nomadic apart from the well-hidden fortresses where they raise their children (Naga have a deep-seated instinct to protect children that is even more substantial and compulsive than the human equivalent). Their magic uses stacking runes, weak effects cast a thousand times, rather than a single strong effect. This results in peerless defensive structures, but is weak on active effects.
- Stoneborn are tall and strong (think D&D Goliaths); they live, for the most part in the southern jungles, in stone cities built over thousands of years. They scar themselves to build magic effects into their very flesh, and their shamans are the epitome of the wild rune-master, who knows a collection of simple and powerful effects accumulated over a long history, rather than a complex system for formulating new ones.
- The last race is the Collectors, who are much like giant preying mantises in general appearance. They trade nomadically. Unfortunately for them, the structure of their eyes makes them incapable of easily determining geometry, emphasizing instead motion and distance vision. This is generally a good trade-off, but it makes doing rune-magic nigh-impossible, so for them, rune-magic is a thing of carefully horded scrolls and artifacts, generally bought from humans or monstra nix.
- Elf-Fall, which is hard-sci-fi setting (if not actually rocketpunk, then certainly rocketpunk-adjacent), with what I consider a medium amount of transhumanism? It's a kinda weird setting, to be honest, since it's a bunch of different sub-ideas merged into one; a world where the greater part of earth is rendered uninhabitable or turned over to wildlife reserve as conventional society flees into arcologies and low-earth-orbit habitats, and the greater solar system grows strange and independent. Highlights include:
- The Ancient race of "Elves", which are a species native to mars. While powerful and possessed of advanced technology, they could not bring together the political unity to respond to the death of their planet, leaving only a few survivors (mostly rendered very far off from the "Native template" by various transhuman (transmartian? tranself?) alterations.) to survive into the modern day. The eponymous Elf-Fall was the decision of some of the few surviving factions to come out of stasis and try and join human society, much to the distress of all the humans who didn't expect a couple of thousand elder beings to try and come hang out.
- The fey-wilds, a sub-setting intended to contrast the survivors in the wastes against the fey-like arcology-dwellers. Presumes some weird sports amongst the arcology dwellers, WRT to feral-animal culling being an national sport, but otherwise quite plausible, and deeply amusing, to me.
- The Synthesis, a clade derived from a series of incredible unethical experiments in a Saturn-orbit colony. The people who made them thought they were making a better humanity, and refused to have any interactions with their erstwhile children, so as to not "taint" them with their own unethical actions. The Synthesis themselves are generally adapted for living in space, have broad enhancements to cognition and health, and a form of bio-wi-fi which allows for empathy, limited telepathy and the sharing of lucid dreams between members of the clade. (They also did quite a good job of absorbing optimism from old-fashioned sci-fi, and have quite a nice little post-scarcity society on the edge of known space).
- It's my dumping ground for spacer traditions, with heraldry and bells and gardens everywhere. The spacers in question are mostly holed up in the asteroid belt, but they are the mainstay of the industrial population within
- It also has my Venus setting! Which is a partially-teraformed place of vast balloon-cities, and of social tensions between the "City-folk" who just happen to live on Venus, and the genetically-engineered settlers, and the "Steeplejacks Guild" who use vast amounts of cybernetics and invasive surgery to be able to maintain the machinery which all civilization on the planet depends on.
I have others, but those three are the ones I'm mostly working on right now. Feel free to ask questions, etc etc. Now that I've got the basics down, when I catch myself ranting at myself about a world-building point, I might try typing it up and posting it instead.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 02:19 pm (UTC)For Four-Arts, if Solomon is the Greatest Conjurer of History, does conjury have any other notable historical/present practitioners? Do aetheromancy, geomancy, or alchemy? What are the bases for these names, considering, for example, that aetheromancy and geomancy do appear to be focused on divination? Are their traditions descended from historical people who believed them to be divinatory? Just a shorthand? Something else? What sorts of alterations/influences can aetheromancers, geomancers, and alchemists effect with their art? How do arts mix, if at all?
For Rune-Carved, how did the races you describe arrive at these interpretations of the system? What is the process of rune-discovery like (both for formal and irregular systems, if there are any similarities)? Besides Collectors collecting runes which they can't (or at least have difficulty) replicate, is there any trade in runes between races? Additionally with respect to Collectors, its not a question per se, but I think it bears mentioning that, even if their eyes are unsuited for geometry, sight is not the only sense that creatures possess, and most animals as far as I'm aware do building at least basic geometric models of their environment.
For Elf-Fall, what are the elves like? Are they humanoid, or more alien? Whats their relation to humanity? What's the rough future-history of the setting? What are notable technology-bases that have been developed since the RL-present? What are the economies of the various places in the solar system like? What is trade between them like? What kind of communication occurs, considering the sheer distances involved?
no subject
Date: 2018-12-15 02:20 am (UTC)On nameing:
- Conjury's core skill is spirit-summoning! That's all there is to it.
- Alchemy is derived from the idea of (Traditional IRL alchemy) as being about a spritual transformation, which happens to have some useful side-effect. The other stuff (especially the kinda anime bits which alchemy (and all the arts; don't think I haven't noticed that the way conjury works would make a passable harem-anime premise) can lean into)
- Geomancy is a pre-existing term for what is essentially beefed-up feng shui, so I stole it for my crafting-magic. If I had to justify it, it'd be because the point of the art is finding patterns which allow you to shape the energy of the world in a desirable way. That bit is much harder than actually shaping them, which often just requires you to sing the right prayers over the right steel under the right phase of the moon.
- Aetheromancy, on the other hand, I made up because it sounded cool, for the most part! It also has divinationatory roots as well, though; seeing the mana is the first and hardest step when it comes to using it as a magic system (though useful enough on its own that many people will learn it without taking the risks involved with going further, since the mana/soul-light/whatever that Aetheromancers see is the same general stuff as everyone else uses, just floating free). That said, this has no deep meaning on the latin root, it's just what I called it.
Atheromancers do data-processing and physics-toy like effects best; computer science has a thousand-year head start in this setting (and probably isn't called computer science) because of the data-processing element. By physics-toy, I mean, they can add kinetic or thermal energy, move things, blast things, make or control electricty, that kind of thing. More esoterice effects are possible, but that stuff is what's common. (And Atheromancy has the big weakness that you have to self-modify into an increasingly alien/apathetic-to-non-atheromancy-things-like-talking-and-breathing mindset to use it. "Spellmazing" is the term for people who couldn't find they're way out again. The ones who can still write technical documents often create great innovations, but it's not a desirable fate in the slightest.)
As mentioned in the other comment, alchemy does conceptual transformations, for the most part, see there for examples.
Geomancy does abstract things the best; charms for health, wealth and happiness are easy to make, while charms for +1d6 fire damage on your sword are not. Geomancy has a good line in divinatory devices; nothing can gather information like the convoluted messes of lenses and nonsense clockwork that a geomantic divining apparatus. Enhanceing the natural use of an item is also pretty easy, and can end up blatantly supernatural, if you're good enough, and put in enough effort. (So adding +1d6 fire damage to a flamethrower, much easier).
As far as art-mixing goes, there's a lot of it. The only thing that really prevents it is just lack of commitment and talent meaning most people only practice one or two, but a true arch-mage is said to need proficiency in all four. (Also, strictly speaking, conjury is two arts that just happen to always be used together; portal-magic to summon things from the void, and contract-magic to bind them to you. both *have* other uses, but they work best used together, so that's what people do).
One example of art-mixing which I do have noted down is the practice of some aetheromancers of "Rooting" thier power. This involved using Alchemy to commit to always using the practice (As part of a general intention of keeping your feet on the ground), so most don't use it, but it enables the practitioner to channel their power through specially made ritual circles (printed on cards or inlayed into the floor, or some such thing). This has the advantage of allowing one to enter the right mindset quicker, and then allowing you to channel more power once you're there, but also kicks you out of the mindset when the power you're pushing through that circle burns it out. Refer to the prior mention of spellmazing before you decide if that's a drawback or not.
Rune-Carved: I don't have time to go into the details of how I arrived at each race's interpretation of the magic, here; I'll add it to the list of future posts to write.
The process of developing new runes is really hard! It's mostly experimentation (which is pretty risky, as you might guess), though the academic systems which are well-known often are due to some theoretical internal consistency that made rounding them out easier, once some of the system was known. There is some trade in runes between races; all the factions have the same general grounding in basic effects that are easy to produce, but there is a strong guild-secrets type tendency for any given group to want to keep their best secrets secrets, so a give rune or rune-technique is slow to spread from it's inventor.
WRT to Collectors and geometery, they do have a geometrical model of reality, it's just too low-resolution for any but the simplest runes, which often require substantial complexity and finesse to create. The Collectors aren't really super into tool-making either; they are doing much better than us for natural weapons (I suspect that for them, the bag was the key invention that kickstarted their evolution, like the pointy rock was for us. My five-minute attempt at an evolutionary path for them suggests that they were deep-desert pack hunters, and they evolved intelligence to be able to make more efficient logistical decisions, which snowballed when they got a social life).
Elf-Fall: As mentioned elsewhere, I'll be making a post for talking about elves. On the other fronts:
Rough Future-history:
There are a 100-200 years of nasty wars ahead of us, I'm afraid, and a bunch of cyberpunk, too. The corporations get stronger, all the world powers punch each other until they fall apart and a nasty set of chain-reactions leads to large sections of china and india being nuclear wasteland (Turns out, "While panicking about one nuclear disaster" is not the best time to neglect maintenance on your other reactors). The world as we know it is changed, but for the most part, humanity survives. The end of this period has the powers which remain building arcologies and automated agriculture to sustain their populations without destroying what remains of the environment. It's about this time that the currently unnamed founders of the synthesis culture flee earth, taking with them all the finest minds of space-travel and bio-engineering, with a predictable set-back in both fields as a result. The end of this era is also where the fey-wilds thing is happening.
The next few hundred years, people start expanding and growing again. A few world-powers start to pop up again, largely undetailed at this stage, and start to seriously fund space-colonization efforts. The first wave are asteroid-miners, the second-wave tries for venus. The Elf-Fall is around the start of the first wave, I think? A routine 1000/10,000 year inspection results in some elves coming out of stasis and noticing they have people they might be able to trade with, and they wake up everyone they can and try to come over.
Moving into the "Present" of the setting, the Venus colonies are probably starting to celebrate their second century, the Synthesis (Saturn, mainly) ones their fourth, and spacers somewhere inbetween? Technology hasn't moved on as much as it could have; they have very good computers, and very good spaceships, but nothing outright alien. They have a much stronger understanding of biotechnology and cognitive-science, but AI-making, while possible is still mostly a crapshoot, and noone (not even the elves) has figured out deliberate uploading (The Elves have a kind of accidental uploading, where you off-load more and more of your identity on AI's and proxy drones until your brain dies and you don't notice, but that takes millennia and is hard to actually guarantee; "Time/fact of death" is a really hard thing to determine for many Elves), which has made most transhumanism a lot harder than it could be; it's mostly focused on making specialized clades of humans, rather than personal enhancement.
The Venusian economy is built around floating farms and automated surface-mines, which are all collected from by gloriously pirateable airships, but they have a large cohort of towns-folk who just happen to live in one of the floating cities and otherwise do all the stuff a functioning civilization needs, like fanfic and accountancy.
The Spacers are less independent, though they do like to try; they're economy is mostly asteroid mining, where they have a strong edge over the earth-corps due to not needing to rotate people out on a 5 or 10 year basis, and due to long-honed skill at not fucking up space travel. They've survived the three-generation rule; the corps haven't. They tend to be smallish companies or independent operators, but with the amount of automation possible, that still means lots of platinum and steel. (The corps don't really mind not having a monopoly, since they can still buy stuff at good rates and half the ones which survived this long are more like non-geographic governments than profit-engines, but the governments don't like how much trouble they've been having keeping anyone outside earth orbit from going independent. Not that they can do much about it).
The Synthesis have, as they say, fully automated luxury gay space communism. Specifically, they have a heavily automated economy for material goods which allows them to ensure substantial universal basic income and trade amongst themselves primarily in industrial capacity rather than goods, to the headache of everyone else.
The various people's theoretically share an internet, built off a backbone of long-range laser links (or whichever similar technology looks most feasible at time of writing). The delay is not worse than a couple of hours, which makes live-chat impossible, and other stuff difficult, but a lot of local caching, and sets of software which automatically send replies forward ASAP make forum-type communication pretty plausible, and given the amount of humanity in random parts of space, probably pretty popular in certain circles.
Okay, I think that's everything people asked except the two things I begged off.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 07:20 pm (UTC)In Four-Arts, what kinds of commitments can produce what kinds of effects?
For Rune-Carved, do you have a map? (I'm trash and like maps for mappy things.) And are there different cultures (multiracial, or within races) that have developed traditions different than the main racial ones you outline?
For Elf-Fall, count me as also curious about the ancient martians. What's their psychology like, what was their civilization like?
no subject
Date: 2018-12-15 01:06 am (UTC)- the commitment/understanding of the slow life; a life of growing old and doing good honest work, will result in a kind of aura of peace. This is an alchemical oath people can take without realizing it, so it mostly manifests as a kind of peace aura - a statistical tendency for things around them to take peaceful, quiet, safe, and honest routes, rather than aggressive, dangerous and dishonest ones. People who know they have it can, with practice, focus the power to act as a calm emotions type thing or even cancel momentum on, say, bullets or a car-crash, but it takes a lot out of them.
- The Yggdrasil Project is a cult (in as much as all alchemy-using groups are cults) born out of the 60s space-flight-type movement. They want to go to space. They've done a good job of designing oaths which help shortcut the difficulties of space-travel; momentum generation/gravity cancelation, the accelerated growth of plants, and maintaining environmental conditions are amongst them (Only thier founding saint has managed to achieve FTL in any capacity, but he's sure it's theoretically possible to teach). They're commitments are kinda onerous; a mix of remembrance and pilgrimages to understand where humanity has come from, and where it is going; I haven't figured out the exact details, but hiking through a place full of green things, and visiting the moon are definitely both needed for mid-level oaths.
- The Hero-Cult of Gilgamesh (which is devoted to emulation more than worshop, of various classical-type heros) has a basic oath whereby nigh-tautological commitment to your own conviction allows a sort of borderline anime toughness; the ability to endure and survive things spending willpower instead of physical integrity/stamina (Even things for which this is nigh pointless).
Rune-Carved: I don't really have a map; the setting is approximately Europe-shaped? The Monstra Nix live in not-russia, the Archons in not-france/italy/spain, the humans in the middle of those two, the naga have a venice-type nation (and secret fortresses on a bunch of islands and less-inhabited deltas or mountains or wherever) but mostly just wander around.
None of the races are politically or culturally unified, but those common threads do stay pretty strong; humans have the most variation, but it's still variation within the theme of preparation heavy artifcing and rituals. In particular, I suspect, though, that the slaving-produced enclaves of Stoneborn have pretty distinct magical traditions from their native forebears. Naga also probably pick up a lot of the magic from where they live, if they can? The core use of their native magics, is defensive, and used primarily for their semi-secret fortresses, so them picking up some other tricks from humans or archons would be unsurprising.
Since Fibbonaci_Reminder also asked about elves, I'll put a write-up about them on my too-do list, rather than putting it here in the comments?
no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 04:45 pm (UTC)