etirabys:

I’m tired of antagonists being powerful competent shadow cabals whose members move as one and whose master plans run on schedule. Instead, I propose:

1. A conspiracy composed of a mix of incompetent and competent people that blows up and becomes a scandal within a month of forming
2. A starter conspiracy led by two competent people who work together well and are loyal to each other, but have been thwarted from forming a real conspiracy circle for years because it’s hard to recruit without bringing in people who will make the group end up like #1. They spend all their time trying to find competent people who share their fringe ideas about how to steer society, but stay in underfunded startup hell mode forever
3. An accidental conspiracy of high-ups in disparate organizations who band together every once in a while for some common cause, but aren’t bonded as a group and have sufficiently different purposes that they’re wary every meeting that this is the time someone will leave in a huff, go to the journalists, and the whole thing will blow up in their faces
4. The AU CIA funds a conspiracy in another country, but the group goes off the rails and starts doing entirely orthogonal shit that sometimes works for the AU!CIA’s purposes but only accidentally
5. Conspiracy that gets nothing useful done because they immediately break up into subgroups that plot against each other (this should be every conspiracy bigger than 4 people)
6. Group that starts off wealthy but bankrupts itself in the process of bribing people to carry out the master plan and pivots its raison d’etre to ‘hide how bankrupt we are so our underlings don’t blackmail or kill us’; it’s been tenuously clinging on for years, appearing to everyone outside the group to be mysterious and well-resourced, known on the inside to be desperately scrabbling to keep the lights on while haphazardly sending people on missions with corkscrewing outcomes

I’m also tired of their Voice-Distorted Silhouette videoconferences being perfectly seamless, give me connectivity issues and screechy feedback and everyone talking over each other and the text chat full of dumb memes and side chatter

tanadrin:

there are several philosophies of worldbuilding. i think the following taxonomy roughly describes four of them:

1) systematic, scholarly, steeped in history and linguistics and geography, using real-world examples to carefully reason about how a fictional world would work. mostly used to build a world first, stories set in that world come later

2) picaresque: just throwing out random stuff as background for the characters in the story you really want to tell to run into. story comes first.

3) saga: you’re telling a story, but it’s on a grand scale, good vs evil kind of shit. the worldbuilding can be systematic, but sometimes realism is ignored for thematic reasons/narrative/rule of cool. Silmarillion is the ur-example (Tolkien gets an A+ in linguistics, but an F in geography); it all holds together as long as you don’t examine any single part in isolation too closely (i.e., mirkwood should be a GIANT RAIN SHADOW DESERT). feels like the most popular form for fantasy, because it admits both high melodrama and smaller scale adventure, or both at the same time. definitely part of ISO Standard Fantasy

4) Fundamentally Weird. can be systematic or unsystematic, but most importantly: you know that thing where most worldbuilding, esp. in fantasy, is concerned with having a day-to-day human-scale experience that resembles our own, or at least an imagined, medievalized version of our own? yeah, throw that out. we’re not doing that, or anything in that neighborhood, or even anything vaguely resembling it. we live on the surface of a hypercube now, or the world is inside a giant flower, or math is haunted by ghosts that whisper the future in the ears of babies or something. I feel like Greg Egan is really, really good at this. But another classic example would be The Inverted World (which is very Eganesque–or should we say Egan is Priestesque?)

I think my preferred style is to inject random weird shit into 2 and 3, and then try to rationalize it via 1, but my favorite kind to read is 4, when it’s well-done.

also, “worldbuilding wiki” should be a more popular genre of fiction. it’s a way more interesting way to explore a world, esp. if liberally littered with in-universe texts (do they contradict one another? is there historical ambiguity? EVEN BETTER) than having an Excuse Plot you have to fill with random episodes.

(via apricops)

Six levels in search of a Soulsborne game

THE FLASHBULB DISTRICT

A loud, blaring neon necropolis, a sort of purgatory zone for as long as you’re able to ignore or deny the fact that you’re dead, which will never get any easier. Art Deco/80s neon style.

VALLEY OF TOIL

The horror of circular bureaucratic pointlessness; breaking stones to build towers and monuments, which are then broken down to build more. Ancient Babylonian/Hellenic style, but with materials from any era.

ARBITER’S CROSSROADS

You can trade anything for anything, but you may not like the exchange rate. An immense multilevel bazaar, but with very little noise or foot traffic at all.

SACRIFICE ZONE

Towering stacks of tenements with toxic rivers in between, with trash regularly flowing from above; main style is goggles and respirators with fine fashions of decades past.

DEATHLESS SPIRES

Obsessively sterile, crystalline archive of people trapped in time moments from death. Gleaming black and white tile with tasteful veins of marble and pink quartz.

RIBCAGE GULCH

The pit at the very bottom of this cosmology, with the beasts of this realm who refuse to accept their own extinction.

Bottled Miracles →

Finally following through on my threats and homebrewing a PbtA game for me mates

The gist is that it’s a sort of fantasy/cyberpunk/poliscifi world; mana was only stabilized on an industrial scale twenty years ago, and there’s been a Shenzhen-speed boom in industry and economy ever since

Story idea, because Lord knows I’m not doing enough already:

In the land of (TBD), the monarch wears the crown AUCTORITAS, which grants a sort of ambient mind-control effect, wherein the citizens’ actions seamlessly converge with the ruler’s will

An outsider arrives, and has some inconvenient questions, like “why can you only think of criticisms for rulers once they’re dead?”

Hijinks ensue, magical systems are examined and exploited, much is expounded on the nature of political legitimacy, all that good stuff

This all grew out of “what if the Mandate of Heaven was an actual MacGuffin?” combined with @luminousalicorn’s excellent story Khan

cryptovexillologist:

A sci-fi/cyberpunk RPG where “Infrastructure” is a learnable language, covering QR codes, serial numbers, all the arcane designations meant to be read only by robots or their highly-trained keepers

It has some similarities and cognates with Legalese, an older language from when the systems had to be made of people

The leader of the Infrastructre-speakers is commonly known as Hexcode the Code Hexer, though her full name is [the entirety of the DeCSS code]

A sci-fi/cyberpunk RPG where “Infrastructure” is a learnable language, covering QR codes, serial numbers, all the arcane designations meant to be read only by robots or their highly-trained keepers

It has some similarities and cognates with Legalese, an older language from when the systems had to be made of people

TIRED: Sci-fi/fantasy nonhuman cultures that are clearly just a riff on an existing human culture

WIRED: Sci-fi/fantasy nonhuman cultures with a lot of aspects from an existing human culture (plus their own syncretic changes) due to extensive contact with that human culture

INSPIRED: The nonhuman culture only ever got, like, a fourth-hand, centuries-displaced idea of what the human culture is like and just extrapolated from there, fixating on very small and strange details

High school friends and I might be playing a Discord D&D campaign soon!

My character came together pretty quickly: Konstantinopl (aka Konsta, Konstan, Konstantin), a Tiefling Cleric who reveres a personification of [Balance/Duty/Justice] that they can never satisfyingly explain

They see everything in terms of transactions and tradeoffs; they’re not necessarily cold or selfish, they’re just acutely aware that everything in the world has a price

Nobody, least of all themself, is sure if they’re Lawful Good or Lawful Evil

If they do awful stuff, they’re acutely aware that they’re racking up huge debts, both tangible and cosmic, and has determined that it’s worth it (by their fallible judgment, anyway)

The worst thing they can call anything is “unharmonious” and their catchphrase is “I will be vindicated.”

cryptovexillologist:

People have shitposted about a Fallout game where culture got stuck in the 90s, but there’s some real potential there

“The Cold War is over! The whole world will smoothly converge on Liberal Western democratic capitalism, and oh dear we lost track of a few nukes due to a clerical error”

Yes, there would be enclaves of tacky neon-and-denim fashion, and boxy/translucent computers, but also a pervasive mood that’s not “we prepared for the worst, and here it is” but rather “we were promised a high-tech consumerist paradise, what the hell?”

In sum: if the 21st century is the saga of every hallowed institution crumbling in a row, what if that all happened a few years ahead of schedule, and in ten seconds?

People have shitposted about a Fallout game where culture got stuck in the 90s, but there’s some real potential there

“The Cold War is over! The whole world will smoothly converge on Liberal Western democratic capitalism, and oh dear we lost track of a few nukes due to a clerical error”

Yes, there would be enclaves of tacky neon-and-denim fashion, and boxy/translucent computers, but also a pervasive mood that’s not “we prepared for the worst, and here it is” but rather “we were promised a high-tech consumerist paradise, what the hell?”

A cyberpunk world dominated by ~vast Japanese conglomerates~ that, it turns out, are actually run by dipshit Anglophone weebs

I’m illustrating the weird tragic planet stories from the other day (and writing some more…), and I hope to release a zine of them soon!

In the meantime, please enjoy the tale of Ramesses-II.

cryptovexillologist:

Ramesses-II is a modest planet, slightly larger than Earth, with scrubland and hardy fauna. The mountain vistas are adequately stunning.

Every interstellar dynasty sees the perfect strategic position, the sprawling plains waiting to bloom, the climate that could so easily be made a little cooler and a little wetter. It will become the jewel in the crown, the blazing beacon of the Empire’s constellation.

And it does bloom, long enough for colonists to feel like Citizens, to stop dreading that it’s just an experiment. The tent cities become mile-high megaliths.

Cynical prophets count the calendar backward, ticking down to ruin, but they’re never cynical enough.

Every time, it fails by a few decimal points the planners chose to ignore. The rains turn slightly too caustic, the seas dry up an inch too far, the volcanoes erupt a year too early. The superstructure fossils become one layer deeper.

The history of Ramesses-II is not censored. But all the past attempts were different- too reckless, too unsophisticated. This time, we will build upon countless dead empires, sink our roots deep into the soil of past colonists, and truly thrive.

Ramesses-II is gorgeous in springtime, when iridescent seeds drift on looping winds through mile-deep canyons. Visit while you can.

At its closest, Clytemnestra is half the size of the Moon, an open wound on the night sky.

It is not the brightest planet, or the first discovered, but its lush splendor drove millions throughout history to lives of scientific study. Even the driest ancient records lapse into paeans to its beauty. Every new telescope revealed more neon jungles, more megaflora unfurling across the horizon.

Once we learned to cross the void, we vowed to stay content with our barren rocks. Officially, we could not predict the provisions Clytemnestra demands.

Data on Clytemnestra was always scarce, through willful ignorance most of all. We refused to probe its depths, or pester it with satellites. Officially, our exploration budget was better spent elsewhere.

Murals of its canopies, vibrant in the wrong ways, hung aspirationally in every city. Hymns to its beauty drift into songs of passion, and back again.

Clytemnestra’s volcanic cycle, erratic and prolonged, was a beloved spectacle. All Earth paused its wars and commerce to watch the forests burn blue. The marshes returned first, then the river forests’ filigree, in a new pattern every time. 

Long ago, after two centuries of silence, the eruptions began and never ceased. We prayed against hope that there would be anything to regrow. We had time, if all of Earth joined in, to snatch seeds from the apocalypse. Officially, they could never grow in our impure soil.

Today, Clytemnestra does not bear solemn, dignified ruin. Its volcanoes have long since burned themselves out, and there is no art to the scars of earthquakes and magma. The dust-choked atmosphere leaks out year by year, revealing ever more erosion and decay.

With our current advancements, it is theoretically possible to restore the land to some fraction of its beauty. Officially, we have no right to try.

Ramesses-II is a modest planet, slightly larger than Earth, with scrubland and hardy fauna. The mountain vistas are adequately stunning.

Every interstellar dynasty sees the perfect strategic position, the sprawling plains waiting to bloom, the climate that could so easily be made a little cooler and a little wetter. It will become the jewel in the crown, the blazing beacon of the Empire’s constellation.

And it does bloom, long enough for colonists to feel like Citizens, to stop dreading that it’s just an experiment. The tent cities become mile-high megaliths.

Cynical prophets count the calendar backward, ticking down to ruin, but they’re never cynical enough.

Every time, it fails by a few decimal points the planners chose to ignore. The rains turn slightly too caustic, the seas dry up an inch too far, the volcanoes erupt a year too early. The superstructure fossils become one layer deeper.

The history of Ramesses-II is not censored. But all the past attempts were different- too reckless, too unsophisticated. This time, we will build upon countless dead empires, sink our roots deep into the soil of past colonists, and truly thrive.

Ramesses-II is gorgeous in springtime, when iridescent seeds drift on looping winds through mile-deep canyons. Visit while you can.