Alicornutopia

This is for the next RP up as we take a break from Sunshine and co. I didn't have time to actually start this today, but I'm going to dump some world building I came up with:

Core themes:
- The Neolithic Revolution with a twist; the result might be called claypunk. Basically, all the big changes are amplified or re-framed as magic, to make it suitably impressive from a modern perspective. And also because random magitech is fun.
- - Farming -> extracting "energy" from people, that can be used for magic artifacts or an anti-death effect. However, staving of your own death from starvation and aging will twist you into a grotesque tree-like thing rooted in place.
- - cities/architecture -> infusing small amount of magic in bricks make then sort of anti-gravity and auto balancing. Arches and towers have no height or stability limits in practice, and cities take full advantage of this plus everyone flying.
- - irrigation/deforestation -> huge-scale magic circles and patterns can shunt around above mentioned energy, with positive or negative energy type effects on plant growth or use in magic. Think Dungeon Keeper Ami corruption.
- - Division of Labor -> Wizards. People who can use all these energies to produce all these artifacts, but at the cost of their ability to fly.
- - Centralized/hierarchical social structures/ideologies -> sinister creatures forming in high concentrations of magic and minds, called Leviathans, that are basically like the Zondervoze from http://goblinpunch.blogspot.se/2014/05/ ... ology.html
- - Writing -> Tablets are tablets, but in a quite more recent sense. You can fit any amount of information on a slab of clay and also get video conferencing with any other ones. These have a receptacle where fire need to be kept burning for much of the functionality.
- - Private property/ownership -> Wards make Fey/vampire-style rules about not being able to enter uninvited apply to everyone. Also can lock objects in place or not make them function for other people.
- - Domestication of animals (+peasant labor/slavery) -> Golems! Another branch o the same tech as tablets, these to require a fire burning within them. Some additional robotic parallels.
- The 10 000 Year mistake; I'm taking as fact the hypothesis that farmers were worse of then foragers for the purpose of this RP. There's a prophecy about it; if the course of history is not redirected, everyone will end up as those tree things in 10 000 years of toil and misery. Some cults hold that after that however everyone will be rewarded, in whats referred to as the Aluminum Age.
- The protagonist is from an hunter-gatherer tribe, and I'm going to actually make some attempt at portraying what such cultures are like fairly, although I probably can't actually manage tumblr standard without unreasonable amounts of research.
- This is alternate-universe earth, somewhat less than 10 000 years ago, Mesopotamian region. One of my title ideas is The First City, and it's meant in a very literal sense.
- A bunch of random fantasy elements thrown in, including all primate ever being winged, including all humans. Like, it's all bird people.

Armok wrote:Some cults hold that after that however everyone will be rewarded, in whats referred to as the Aluminum Age.

Wikidpedia says:

The metal was first produced in 1825 in an impure form by Danish physicist and chemist Hans Christian Ørsted. ...

Prior to commercial electrical generation in the early 1880s, and the Hall-Héroult process in the mid 1880s, aluminium was exceedingly difficult to extract from its various ores. This made pure aluminium more valuable than gold.[51] Bars of aluminium were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1855.[52] Napoleon III of France is reputed to have given a banquet where the most honoured guests were given aluminium utensils, while the others made do with gold.[53][54]

How do they even know that aluminum is a thing? Or, alternately, if you're going with them having magic and being able to take advantage of the fact that

Aluminium is the third most abundant element (after oxygen and silicon), and the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust.

why do they consider aluminum to be a reward?

Dumping a chatlog in here.

Alicorn: I get a strong aesthetic sense (which I like very much) but little concrete structure, from reading this post.
Rasmus Eide: thats because thats exactly what is there, wich is because thats exactly what I've generated so far
Alicorn: makes sense then
Rasmus Eide: any ideas for structure?
Alicorn: I am *really* intrigued by the substittuions chart you have for magickifying advances
Alicorn: I don't know what the tree thing is supposed to mean or how the wizards are supposed to work though.
Rasmus Eide: the tree thing is about farmers get rooted in place
Rasmus Eide: wizards mostly do pottery, with magicly symbols on it and infuse it with life energy and stuff like mixing their own blood into the clay
Alicorn: why can't they fly?
Rasmus Eide: because they pas to much enegy throguh them and it degrades the physicaly
Rasmus Eide: they are hunchbacked and arthritic
Alicorn: I mean in terms of the conceptual adaptation
Alicorn: what is "can't fly" standing in for
Rasmus Eide: ah. Losing the general purpose abilities to survive on their own and be truely free.
Alicorn: But I assume they make a shitload of money?
Alicorn: (Or should currency be replaced with, like, some kind of magical karma system? Currency: also an invention.)
Rasmus Eide: that life energy thing is sort of both curency and food
Alicorn: I'm not really sure I understand the life energy thing. I understand the farming = turning into a tree part but not what the extracting energy from people thing is.
Rasmus Eide: that formers produce a surplus and that's what enables cities
Alicorn: back up like two inferential steps?
Rasmus Eide: withote the surounding farmers, thecity will crubmble - in this case literaly.
Rasmus Eide: ok maybe clarifying your question will help
Alicorn: which question
Rasmus Eide: but you dont need to, really. neither I nor anyone in the world is 100% clear on everything, and the alegory level is not suposed to be watertight conceptualy
Rasmus Eide: the question abaut trees?
Alicorn: I think I understand the tree part now.
Alicorn: Anyway, perhaps I should clarify: I do not want to play a character who is *from* a setting unless I feel comfortable and confident that I understand what that character knows or have an ironclad expectation that I will be able to come to a well-understood consensus with my co-creators on the fly.
Rasmus Eide: ah
Rasmus Eide: hmm
Alicorn: Kappa leans harder on "understand in advance", Aestrix leans harder on "confident that we will come to consensus on the fly".
Rasmus Eide: my solution is to think of a better solution at a saner time of day when I'm laess stupid.
Alicorn: Okay. Whenever you're ready.
Rasmus Eide: HOPEFULLY tomorow
Alicorn: I love the claypunk aesthetic and might want to run off with it to do my own thing with, failing all else, if I didn't have so much else going on XD
Rasmus Eide: yea I'm thinking we might just let you have full control over the tribe and have it faily isolated
Rasmus Eide: they might have seen a few stage devices and heard stuff from travelers, but not enoguh or relaibly enoguh to mtter
Alicorn: I don't think I have a clear picture of who you want each of us to be playing.
Rasmus Eide: thats because I dont either
Rasmus Eide: but I'd GUESS somethign similar to previus with you playing a bells and me ebing more vagely GMy
Rasmus Eide: but really the wordbuilding ran away with me and the actual ideas how to make an RP of it didn't as much
Alicorn: If this setting had come to me in a dream and you were busy being on the Moon or something, what I would do with it would be I'd neaten up some of the edges, pitch it to Aestrix and do more neatening, and then come up with completely de novo characters to work on building the first city and developing the early claypunk magitech. It doesn't seem to aesthetically fit anyone in my current character repertoire but it's cool enough to be a backdrop for sounding out a new character - the problem is it would need more *plot* besides "they invent and build shit"
Rasmus Eide: ok, that soulds like a good plan, not that I'm in any shape to judge plans right now
Alicorn: my brain's first idea on that front is something like - our characters (one or more apiece) are siblings, children of the first claypunk pioneer, so there is currently variety of fields to go into but not much depth of existing work in any of them, and they pick different specialties, and then disagree about something fundamental and split into factions
Alicorn: I don't require an opinion now but it will be there later
Rasmus Eide: well I'm not sure on the poineer engineer thing, but having a main character each and doing NPCs/world together is an intresting idea
Alicorn: and the factions could be me-on-one-side-you-on-the-other but it might be more fun if we had a mix - like if I had a golem person and a tablet person and you had a building floaty cities person and an irrigation person and so I was mostly running a nomad/barbarian tribe but still more sophisticated than hunter-gatherers and you were running a burgeoning empire (or vice versa, am not attached) but also we were running spouses or friends or whatever of these people and both had eyes and hands on both sides.
Alicorn: dangit this makes me want to write a novel but I am in the middle of three other novels and I'm not working on any of them
Alicorn: anyway that's my preliminary pass, I will wait to ruminate on it more until you've rendered a clearminded opionion possibly-tomorrow-possibly-later :)
Rasmus Eide: sounds like I've got you inspired thou!
Alicorn: very! I love this idea, this is a great idea.
Rasmus Eide: and yea. Maybe post somethgin in the thread if it dosnt go in this chat well, otherwise we check of tomorow again
Alicorn: *nod*
Rasmus Eide: because I need to get done with some stuff so I can sleep right now
Alicorn: *nod*
Rasmus Eide: It's been fun just to hear you like nmy ideas thou!
Alicorn: ~claypunk~
Alicorn: I am excited about claypunk
Alicorn: If kappa or Aestrix want to fork and vary the idea and run something with me in a claypunk setting do you object?
Rasmus Eide: not at all! I'd love to see my ideas used!
Alicorn: :D
Rasmus Eide: I'm realy confused aabut why other people tend to object to everything they make being used for absultely everything it might be any use, and alyed that that's asumed, because I have so much awesome stuff that needs to come out and nothignt o do with most of it
Alicorn: Some people are concerned about money, some people just feel icky about it, some people don't want to see their stuff misinterpreted
Rasmus Eide: Both these settings I essentialy generated from nothing in 2 days or so, just runing backgroun  d proccesses in the shower and when falling asleep or on walks and such,a nd I could prety much KEEP doing that forever
Alicorn: I try to avoid doing that because god knows I'm IN THE MIDDLE OF THREE NOVELLLLLLS AAAAH.

... Alicorn, do I need to set out rabbit traps to keep the plot bunnies under control? DO NOT GIVE IN TO THE PLOT BUNNIES! Do we need to ask the Australians for help engineering a plot-bunny-specific plague, here? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia)

That said, I love the ideas being discussed here. I can see a few ways they could work, ranging from a novel (in the "new" sense) setting for Belling to something Completely Different. One example that came to mind at the latter end of that scale was a multi-generational story / series of short stories, each part touching on key points in the society's development. Each part would be told from a character's point of view (or at least following them, third-person) as they experience or introduce some innovation or major upheaval in society. The next part would pick up again decades later by the same characters now grown to adulthood / those characters' children / something like that. Continuity could be maintained any number of ways, from simple ancestor legends to some stone-age-magitech/claypunk equivalent of tribal storytelling (you already have the tablets...) to "fuck it, let's just have (some) people be immortal", although actual characters would change as the story progressed. This lets significant time periods - enough for nations to rise and fall, for example - to be contained in a single story without compressing events and progress to a ridiculous degree.

... I have more ideas but I need to stop now. That one escaped and I don't *want* to go shoot it but THERE ARE THREE NOVELS! (Four is right out (unless they are lights).)

There are still mass amounts of rabbits in Australia. They are cute and pleasent to watch, but distressing when they run out into the middle of the road and your car hits them.

.....rabbiiiiiiiits.

Please continue world building conversation.

cbhacking wrote:Each part would be told from a character's point of view (or at least following them, third-person) as they experience or introduce some innovation or major upheaval in society. The next part would pick up again decades later by the same characters now grown to adulthood / those characters' children / something like that. Continuity could be maintained any number of ways, from simple ancestor legends to some stone-age-magitech/claypunk equivalent of tribal storytelling (you already have the tablets...) to "fuck it, let's just have (some) people be immortal", although actual characters would change as the story progressed.

This reminds me of the structure of the Legends of Ethshar series, and I think that structure would work well in this setting (which aesthetic sounds fantastic by the way). That structure is basically, the books share a common continuity and sometimes reference the events of each other, but each is a separate story about an event in the history of Ethshar, from the point of view of whoever was there to witness it. So applying that to this setting, there could (for example) be "the story of the invention of tablets" and "the story of the time that golems were used to break the seige on the city" and so on, where none of them are exactly sequels to each other, but they all add up to create a history and sense-of-place. Characters in the golem story might reference the tablet story, perhaps to illustrate some key point, but characters from the tablet story would essentially be the equivalent of mythic heroes or historical figures or celebrities to the characters of the golem story.