World of "And Another Thing"
Dec. 16th, 2018 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fibonacci_reminderHere are some rough sketches for the background setting of "And Another Thing", a story idea I've been working on with a girlfriend of mine.
The world itself is dominated by a single, massive city, dotted with great, monolithic buildings of stone, and otherwise filled with smaller buildings of cut stone and wood, or the occasional hollowed out mega-tree. Water rises up in great fountains, which in turn flow down into aqueducts and down into many buildings, providing some amount of flowing water to most people in the world. The world itself is small, as far as worlds go, though naturally very large for a city, at maybe something like 500k square kilometers. Topologically, it's technically toroidal, but for most purposes it's planar.
Sociologically, there's a something of a caste system that hinges on the two bloodline-based magic systems. At the bottom are people don't have either bloodlines (often called 'the masses', 'the unblooded', etc.), who make up the significant majority of the population, constituting the overall least wealthy, generally being craftsmen, lawmen, deliverymen, and similar. Above them are those who have the healing bloodline, also called 'the gifted', who make up about a fifth of the population. Most gifted have little talent for the gift, and end up in similar jobs to ungifted but often getting promoted to managerial positions faster and more reliably. Academic, scholarly, or otherwise intellectual pursuits also significantly over-represent gifted, and doubly so for medical professions, where the ungifted are all but totally absent. Gifted are often seen as inherently more moral than the ungifted, especially if their gift is strong and they pursue a career in medicine. Finally, at the apex are the members of the shaping bloodline, the rarest and arguably most power, and the only ones whose privileges are explicit. All shapers are descendants of the First Shaper, the subject of religious veneration and political legitimacy across the world, who is known for having 'tamed the world' or 'made the world safe.' From this, and from the incredible power of their magic, they derive the privilege to favorable legal treatment, independent incomes, positions of political power or at the heads of civic administration. When not occupied with those things, shapers generally have jobs suited to their special abilities, such maintaining the farms (held aloft over the city on great pillars), driving the great stone boxes which carry municipal and other large-scale deliveries across the longest distances, etc.
Getting to magic itself, there are four types. The first, and most common (though only by a hair) are Talents, which are inclinations towards certain sorts of physical action that a person can lean on to develop otherwise superhuman aptitude for. Talents arise in everyone, generally around the age of 7 or 8, though they continue to hone themselves as the person ages, and as they practice more. Talents often align with the person's self-concept, and with skills they find interest or joy in, though whether this relationship flows causally or is more of a feedback loop isn't known. After Talents, there are Illusions (or more accurately Divination/Illusion, though its essentially only referred to as the latter), which are combinations of physical gestures and mental visualizations which, if performed correctly, can create hallucinations, record sensory information from the user's mind, or access and manipulate a nonphysical storage of that information. Historically, illusions which were inflicted on unwilling victims were of limited by non-zero military or law-enforcement use, and are often called 'battle illusions', but in more recent times teams of dedicated illusionists have created something like an internet using illusions, and self-targeted illusions used to access this internet have achieved widespread use. Development of new illusions is generally quite difficult, though with the introduction of this internet, it has been somewhat simplified. Use of illusions for the purposes of computation is also beginning to really build steam. Then, there is healing, one of the two bloodline-limited magics, also called 'the gift,' which grants its gifted the ability to control flesh, both their own and others. However, regardless of the users strength of gift, don't gain any kind of special sense or intuition regarding biology, and so effective use of their ability beyond the superficial requires a significant of medical training. Also, while their ability and their reputation is 'healing,' their ability itself isn't limited to restoring a person (or animal, or plant) to the way it once used to be. Using their power to modify someone or something is called 'warping,' and is severely looked down upon, seen as a corruption of the gift. Additionally, a quirk of healing/warping is that user develops a sort of empathic connection to who or whatever they're using it on, which both discourages using it to harm others (one of the primary uses for which warping is looked down upon), and also makes using the gift on oneself extremely dangerous, since it can lead to a feedback cycle of either excruciating, hellish pain or and extremely addictive pleasure. Finally, above it all is shaping, the other bloodline-limited magic, the ability of a scant few of the First Shaper's many descendants to shape the earth and stone of the world at a whim, even in mindbogglingly huge quantities. A shaper's finesse is not so inherent, but most have natural talent for the skill, and shaper-sculpted statues are a common feature of places they frequent.
That's, most of what I've worked so far, explicitly at least. Please feel free to ask questions as always
The world itself is dominated by a single, massive city, dotted with great, monolithic buildings of stone, and otherwise filled with smaller buildings of cut stone and wood, or the occasional hollowed out mega-tree. Water rises up in great fountains, which in turn flow down into aqueducts and down into many buildings, providing some amount of flowing water to most people in the world. The world itself is small, as far as worlds go, though naturally very large for a city, at maybe something like 500k square kilometers. Topologically, it's technically toroidal, but for most purposes it's planar.
Sociologically, there's a something of a caste system that hinges on the two bloodline-based magic systems. At the bottom are people don't have either bloodlines (often called 'the masses', 'the unblooded', etc.), who make up the significant majority of the population, constituting the overall least wealthy, generally being craftsmen, lawmen, deliverymen, and similar. Above them are those who have the healing bloodline, also called 'the gifted', who make up about a fifth of the population. Most gifted have little talent for the gift, and end up in similar jobs to ungifted but often getting promoted to managerial positions faster and more reliably. Academic, scholarly, or otherwise intellectual pursuits also significantly over-represent gifted, and doubly so for medical professions, where the ungifted are all but totally absent. Gifted are often seen as inherently more moral than the ungifted, especially if their gift is strong and they pursue a career in medicine. Finally, at the apex are the members of the shaping bloodline, the rarest and arguably most power, and the only ones whose privileges are explicit. All shapers are descendants of the First Shaper, the subject of religious veneration and political legitimacy across the world, who is known for having 'tamed the world' or 'made the world safe.' From this, and from the incredible power of their magic, they derive the privilege to favorable legal treatment, independent incomes, positions of political power or at the heads of civic administration. When not occupied with those things, shapers generally have jobs suited to their special abilities, such maintaining the farms (held aloft over the city on great pillars), driving the great stone boxes which carry municipal and other large-scale deliveries across the longest distances, etc.
Getting to magic itself, there are four types. The first, and most common (though only by a hair) are Talents, which are inclinations towards certain sorts of physical action that a person can lean on to develop otherwise superhuman aptitude for. Talents arise in everyone, generally around the age of 7 or 8, though they continue to hone themselves as the person ages, and as they practice more. Talents often align with the person's self-concept, and with skills they find interest or joy in, though whether this relationship flows causally or is more of a feedback loop isn't known. After Talents, there are Illusions (or more accurately Divination/Illusion, though its essentially only referred to as the latter), which are combinations of physical gestures and mental visualizations which, if performed correctly, can create hallucinations, record sensory information from the user's mind, or access and manipulate a nonphysical storage of that information. Historically, illusions which were inflicted on unwilling victims were of limited by non-zero military or law-enforcement use, and are often called 'battle illusions', but in more recent times teams of dedicated illusionists have created something like an internet using illusions, and self-targeted illusions used to access this internet have achieved widespread use. Development of new illusions is generally quite difficult, though with the introduction of this internet, it has been somewhat simplified. Use of illusions for the purposes of computation is also beginning to really build steam. Then, there is healing, one of the two bloodline-limited magics, also called 'the gift,' which grants its gifted the ability to control flesh, both their own and others. However, regardless of the users strength of gift, don't gain any kind of special sense or intuition regarding biology, and so effective use of their ability beyond the superficial requires a significant of medical training. Also, while their ability and their reputation is 'healing,' their ability itself isn't limited to restoring a person (or animal, or plant) to the way it once used to be. Using their power to modify someone or something is called 'warping,' and is severely looked down upon, seen as a corruption of the gift. Additionally, a quirk of healing/warping is that user develops a sort of empathic connection to who or whatever they're using it on, which both discourages using it to harm others (one of the primary uses for which warping is looked down upon), and also makes using the gift on oneself extremely dangerous, since it can lead to a feedback cycle of either excruciating, hellish pain or and extremely addictive pleasure. Finally, above it all is shaping, the other bloodline-limited magic, the ability of a scant few of the First Shaper's many descendants to shape the earth and stone of the world at a whim, even in mindbogglingly huge quantities. A shaper's finesse is not so inherent, but most have natural talent for the skill, and shaper-sculpted statues are a common feature of places they frequent.
That's, most of what I've worked so far, explicitly at least. Please feel free to ask questions as always
no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 06:51 am (UTC)(Also, does that imply that only people with the illusionist power can access the internet?)
(I also have some questions about the economics of this place, but I'm not sure how best to formulate them).
no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 11:52 am (UTC)Yes, only people who learn the internet access illusions can access the internet. Doing so isn’t an especially onerous task though, especially since an illusion that you can used to reminder yourself of them if you forget exists.
On the eveonomic front, if it helps you find a way to phrase your question, what about the world’s description at the moment prompted you to think of it?
no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 10:07 am (UTC)I'm kinda thinking of it like Noblis's Aspect power, if that helps to see where I'm going?
And I think it was primarily the mention of suspended farms? Does that block out all the light? How does that produce remotely enough food? I guess Talented farmers would help.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 10:38 am (UTC)There are pretty large sections of the city that are shaded by the farms most of the time, and they are commensurately more focused on things like mushroom farming, storage, manufacturing, and other less light-demanding purposes rather than, say, housing or storefronts. As for how they produce enough food, it's a combination of Talented farmers, Shapers providing supernaturally fertile and aerated soil (spoiler, ROT13:) naq zntvpny trargvpnyyl-ratvarrerq fhcre-pebcf gung jrer perngrq ol gur jnecre rzcver gung cerprqrq gur funcref pbzvat vagb orvat.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 12:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 12:59 pm (UTC)