Tag Archive | worldbuilding

So, You’ve Managed to Survive the Apocalypse… and the immediate post-apoc no-tech horror…

Jun1

…You’ve managed to survive the end of the world, where 90% of the people didn’t.

You’ve managed to survive the first few horrid years of “shit, how do we feed ourselves?” and so on.

It is now Apoc+5, and you and about 400 other people have managed to form a small, mostly-self-sufficient community.

It’s time to think of the laws, the taxes, the ideals by which your society will be governed, and your input is being asked for – and valued highly.

What are the top tenets of the society as you suggest them?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/723416.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Thirty-One: Fae Apoc

Mar13

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I answered question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here.

The fourth question comes from an offline friend and is for the Faerie Apocalypse

What does the world look like in the year 2150?

The short answer is: I don’t know yet. I’ve only specced out in any detail at all through about fifty years after the apoc.

What I know:

Starting from a noncimated population of about 31,000,000 at the end of 2012, the American population did not grow for at least a generation (say, until 2035) – disease, starvation, contaminated water and food sources, and a lack of expected medical supplies, as well as remaining returned gods, isolationism, small territory wars, and monsters spawned by the Collapse conspired to keep the population very low, actually trickling down a bit more to around 29 million people.

By 2050, the population was beginning to grow again:
33 million in 2050, 57 million by 2080. By that rate, it’s safe to assume that, by 2150, the population of what had been the United States might get to be around 120,000,000 or a little over 1/3 of what it is IRL today.

140 years is a long time in terms of oral history and predjudice; the first generation of humans after the war almost universally hated fae; even those who had experienced positive relationships with specific fae didn’t like all Ellehemaei. There were maybe “a few good apples” in an otherwise rotten bunch.

And predatory Ellehemaei did not help that impression: especially directly after the war, there were more than a few fae who set up their own little nation-states – some not so little. There were humans who did the same, of course, but the fae “cheated,” using magic and their innate durability and longevity to hold positions of strength over “lesser” humans.

In general, by 2060, there are some humans who believe that fae are all right, maybe less than 25% of the whole population. By 2150, the numbers have shifted in the other direction, and nearly 75% of the population believes, if not that Ellehemaei the equals of humans, at least that they should be allowed to co-exist. And many in both eras know they can be useful (“just get someone who can make the collaring stick and use it!”)

By 2060, Addergoole and Addergoole East were already having a strong influence on the world around them: their graduates became teachers, mayors, despots, doctors, city-builders. By 2150, two creations of Addergoole grads are also shaping the world: a teaching hospital and Doomsday Academy, both formed around 2060.

~

This is a bit all over the place, back to government for a moment. In 2060, the remains of the United States is governed in primarily settlement-based city-states, with as little contact with other settlements as possible, save by those who wander, either to sell goods or offer services. By 2150, many of those settlements have begun to coalesce into small countries; there are 6 major-geographic-area nations and at least 25 smaller ones, many of who battle over land on a semi-regular basis.

The world will never again be what it was before the Collapse, but what it could become is still wide open.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/692874.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Thirty: Facets of Dusk

Mar12

[personal profile] piratekitten declared February world-building month.
And now it is March and I am finishing up the questions!
The question post is here
The eighteenth question comes from [personal profile] clare_dragonfly and is for Facets of Dusk
Who discovered the portal thingies? How did it start out?

In the universe the team calls Prime, in our era, Alexa discovered the Doors by accident.

She was – or had been – dating Aerich, and they got into yet another fight, as they were prone to doing. She stormed out of his study and into his library, through a door that was older than the family house in which he lived.

[Aerich’s family consist of a long and esteemed lineage of scholarly mages who discovered the Doors centuries ago, but had never figured out how to make them properly function. As only a few people in any given billion have the ability, nobody in Aerich’s family, nor their associates, had ever managed to spark the doors. Alexa did.]

She traveled from universe to universe for three years; there was a murder investigation back on Earth Prime, and she was officially declared missing: presumed dead.

While Aerich was being charged with her murder, Alexa was discovering by trial and error how the Doors work and how to find them. They do not always lead to the same place multiple times in a row and, unlike a Stargate, they don’t come with a coordinate system. Each universe has several, although the specific number varies with world.

When she returned – not into Aerich’s family library, but into a storeroom in the basement of a famous university – she was immediately snagged by a shadow branch of the U.S. Government, working with an unwilling but competent Aerich and several of his associates.

Once they determined that Alexa could, indeed, open the Doors, they put together an exploration team, and the Facets team was born.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/691062.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Twenty*cough*Nine: Addergoole

Mar11

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here.

The twenty-ninth question comes from [personal profile] librarygeek and is for Addergoole.

Keeping: Was it part of the original plan or it something fae? Is there any specific magical binding for Keeper and Kept? I just read a reference to ‘Hell Night’ and wasn’t caught so he should be home free. Is being caught at Hell Night how you get to be Kept?

Keeping is the effect of one of the Laws of Belonging.

The Laws are the rules which bind all Ellehemaei (fae); they fall in a few different categories, but the ones that interest us here are those of Belonging.

These laws state that a fae will first belong to its* Mother, then to its Mentor, and then to itself, but that a fae, once they belong to themselves, may choose to belong to another adult fae.

There are connotations to the word “belong” in the language used for the Laws (commonly called The Old Tongue) which include a sense of responsibility rather than just proprietorship; the word literally means “under another’s name,” and one who Belongs to another, either as their child, their student, or their Kept, is that person’s complete responsibility.

The ritual that makes two fae Keeper and Kept – at its most basic, a repeated statement of “you’re mine;” “Yes, I’m yours” – binds the Kept to the Keeper. Once Kept, a fae cannot disobey direct orders from its Keeper. The Kept feels bad if they disappoints or angers the Keeper, good if they are praised, and will often strive to please their Keeper at all costs.

The binding on Keeper is societal – if the Kept upsets or offends someone, it is the Keeper’s responsibility to ameliorate the problem. If the Kept breaks a law, the Keeper has to deal with the consequences. And the Keeper is responsible for making sure its Kept are fed, housed, clothed (if they so wish), and so on.

All of this covers Keeper and Kept relationships in the greater world outside of Addergoole, as they happen within what passes for fae society in the world.

“Hell Night” is a function of Addergoole.

Originally intended as a gentle hazing ritual to induce stress in new students – because stress is part of what causes juvenile fae to go through the Changes that make them full fae – over the years of the school, it has become a darker, more intense day of pranks, chases, and flat-out bullying, with an underlying secondary cause of enticing students who do not yet know about Keeping to agree to belong to someone for the year. So, in Addergoole, being caught on Hell Night is how you are often Kept, and the day in which the upperclassmen are the most intent on hunting down their new prey.

* Ellehemaei use a gender-neutral pronoun; the closest English has is “it.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/689925.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day x: Addergoole/Fae Apoc

Mar6

Physical damage, Ellehemaei, Hawthorn and rowan

I was starting a story and realized I hadn’t determined how Ellehemaei dealt with damage.

So:

A normal Ellehemaei (defined here as a fae who has a Change and the ability to use Words) heals damage the same way as a human and at the same rate; the only difference is that an Ellehemaei can survive damage that would kill a human, and the older the Ellehemaei, the longer they can hold out without healing. (For example, hypothermia, bleeding out, poisoning).

Ellehemaei can, of course, heal themselves, too, with the proper Words (Jasfe (repair) Tlacatl (Flesh of Makers). (And is it not interesting that the same Word covers all fae and all humans?) (And possibly aliens…) They can repair almost any sort of damage, even lost limbs (although something that severe may take Meentik (create) as well as Jasfe.

When hawthorn and rowan get involved, things get complicated. The two woods are poison to all Ellehemaei; hawthorn, in addition to being poison, also inhibits magic use in its presence; it’s hard to Work, hard to Work around, and if it gets into the bloodstream of a fae, it’s almost impossible for them to do any Workings at all while it’s running around in their blood.

A wound made with hawthorn or rowan will act like an acid burn in addition to any stabbing or slicing damage done. The wound will be slow to heal without magic, very slow, and will be difficult to impossible to heal with magic, depending on the power level of the Worker involved. If a limb is amputated with hawthorn or rowan, esp. if the sap is used on the wound, only the most powerful fae in the world can repair it.

On the other hand, they don’t appear to age quickly, and when they do age, they can always use Workings to repair some of the signs of age.

(Thanks to @KissofJudas for help figuring this out)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/688227.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Twenty-Five: Addergoole

Feb28

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The twenty-fifth question comes from [personal profile] anke and is for Addergoole.

What’s the reasoning behind keeping future Addergoole students in the dark about pretty much everything?

This one is actually fairly straight-forward.

One of the primary purposes of the Addergoole School is to encourage more half-breed children to Change, thus coming into the full extent of their powers, and to Change in a safely controlled environment, where they are unlikely to, say, set the school gym on fire or get killed by a mob.

Stress and surprise can trigger the change, and a series of stressors and surprises can trigger it more quickly than all the surprises at once; thus Hell Night, which originally was meant to spook and scare students more than it was meant to ambush them into Keepings.

However, for various and sundry reasons, the Administration is happier if every student of Addergoole experiences a year Kept. A secondary reason for the secrecy is that it makes new students easier to catch.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/682733.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Twenty (Yesterday): Dragons Next Door

Feb21

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The twentieth question comes from Kelkyag and is for Dragons Next Door

How did a magic-ignorant to magic-averse race of technology users wind up the clueless dominant race in a world full of magic, some of it not at all subtle?

Nobody is quite sure! This goes well with How do dweomers originate?.

The problem is, humans showed up. As far as anyone can tell, they showed up already knowing how to hurt dragons and ogres and centaurs, how to fight against spellcasters, how to do more damage than anything that small and seemingly-helpless ought to be able to manage. They showed up already deadly.

Well, that’s one theory.

Another theory is that the humans, by their sheer mundanity, seemed to hold off the other races, who didn’t know what to do with something that small and that helpless and still determined to push on.

Another theory is that they’re the pet project of some ancient spellcaster of one form or another, and that they are protected from being overrun by said spellcaster’s, well, spells.

What is true is that humans aren’t entirely clueless. They’re just used to living in their areas, while the magic things live in theirs. They’re used to thinking of many of the magic races as lesser, smaller – in terms of, ah, enlightenment, they’re back at least fifty years from IRL, possibly closer to a hundred and fifty. Dweomers, of course, and in other ways tinies and pixies, have always existed alongside humans when they chose to – and, indeed, dweomers don’t even have their own cities (Unless you count the region in which the Black Tower resides, but that’s a story for another day). But most of the strangest races have lived in their own places and only within the last fifty years begun co-existing with humans in the same cities.

After all, the tiny fragile things have such interesting toys.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/675937.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Nineteen: Fae Apoc

Feb20

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The ninteenth question comes from [personal profile] rix_scaedu and is for the Faerie Apocalypse

What happens to someone who’s Changed and cannot find or persuade an adult to Mentor them?

I… do not know. I honestly don’t.

There are certainly kids like Reegan in these two stories:
http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/411653.html
http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/588052.html
who have trouble finding a Mentor – because their family or they themselves are disliked, because there are no older fae in the area, because they Change out of a line that hasn’t had a Change in long enough that nobody knows what to do, or because they Change away from anyone or everyone.

And I suppose it’s possible, especially a couple centuries pre-apocalypse or immediately post-apoc, when the human population and thus the fae population are so thinly spread, that a fae child thus Changed could go unnoticed.

If so, it is almost impossible (unless they are sequestered in a tower full of fae books) that they will develop any use of Words – and that is for the better, because without guidance, Workings can quickly become disastrous.

Without a Mentor to guide them into learning to Mask, they are likely to stick out like a sore thumb. They will either become a mythic figure, a monster, a freak (assuming enough of a Change to stick out, of course) – or they will be locked up, studied, stared at.

Their innate, if mild, will probably be entirely usable and controllable with practice. If they have a more excessive power – pyrokinesis, for instance, or storm-calling – they are likely to come back to “strange Change” above, to bringing way too much attention to themselves.

It’s likely, pre- or post-apoc, that they will eventually bring enough attention to themselves inadvertently, one way or another, and some fae will find them.

Then the question becomes: what are the intentions of that fae?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/672382.html. You can comment here or there.

February: World-Building Month

Feb10

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The eighth question comes from Kelkyag and is for Dragons Next Door

How do dweomers originate?

There are probably as many theories of the origin of dweomers as there are dweomers – and possibly more than that, as many of the other races have opinions on these not-quite-human-more-than-humans.

What is known is: They rarely but occasionally appear to spontaneously generate; cases where two normal humans give birth to a dweomer are almost entirely the result of one or both humans lying or being misinformed about their own genetics.

There have been dweomers around as long as, say, Dragons and Centaurs and the like have been known – which is to say, at least as long as history has been written, and the dragons have very long histories. Dweomers are crossfertile with humans, they look like humans, they can generally pass as humans as long as blood or genetic tests are not involved, but they are not, in actuality, human.

(If you look at the science of this too hard, I will remind you that this world involves tiny-humanoids in two categories, as well as centaurs and dragons. <3)

One of the favorite theories is that humans themselves are the anomaly: the world grew up with dragons and ogres, centaurs and elkin and such, but at some point humans fell into this world from an alternate reality. They found dragons eggs to be immensely irresistible, and found clever ways to hunt them; they found centaurs to be very tempting mounts, and quickly managed to enslave some.

(This, of course, being a tale told around fires, especially non-human fires, does not say how the humans did such).

The short answer is: the question isn’t so much how did dweomers originate, as how did humans originate.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/663767.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Seven: Stranded

Feb7

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The seventh question comes from Kelkyag and is for Stranded World

Is perceiving and manipulating strands innate or learned? How do people acquire and develop these abilities?

References: Magic in Stranded World
Strand-workers and Strand-Working Organizations

Yes. 🙂

The ability to see or manipulate the Strands is an inheritable innate ability.

There are those who believe that, at one time, all humans had this power, but most of them are poo-pooed; studies show that almost every case of a known Strand-Weavers can be traced genealogically to a handful of magically inclined people in approx. 450 AD.

The innate power comes in a number of different types: not everyone who can work with the Strands can do the same things, and, indeed, the categories barely overlap at all. Thus, Spring’s ability to be a Tangler versus her brother Winter’s ability to smooth and calm the Strands, and so on.

Of course, part of the reason that the known strand-weavers can be traced back to the same people has to do less with insularity of genetics and more with insularity of training, knowledge, and literature.

The innate abilities – any of them – can be problematic without training, and can in some cases lead to abuses of the power, either accidental or purposeful. The organizations that exist to train and educate new strand-weavers can be very harsh with those caught in abuses. (Some say this is because they want to keep all the power controlled, others because they don’t want word to get around that rogue magicians, such as they are, are capable of hurting people and throwing around dangerous “spells.”)

Thus, most people who are “known” to be Strand-Weavers are educated by the same group of people, and thus know the same group of people (and thus, often, marry or at least have children with the same group of people).

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/659869.html. You can comment here or there.