More Worldbuilding Rumination

I haven't written anything since Nanowrimo ended. Real Life sort of came flooding back in to inundate me, and although this has been bad for writing time, I've noticed that a month-long break has renewed my energy for getting work done. Especially work at work. I was getting pretty burnt out and feeling like I was in a rut, and spending way too much time doing personal stuff and web-browsing than working, and not feeling sufficiently guilty about it; now I'm attacking my to-do list with renewed vigor.

Meanwhile, I've gotten back into the swing of things for roleplaying. Not that it's needed. It turns out that most of my players aren't around much anymore, and although nobody has actually left the game, it's not looking like it'll revive anytime soon. Which is fine. Christmas break is coming up to throw a wrench into things anyway, so I'll worry in January.

A lot of my non-work time has been spent beta testing the next version of the roleplaying website. The admin guy is going full steam ahead trying to finish it up so he can release it, but there's still lots of bugs to find and fix. Beta testing is always interesting and fun to me, when I have time for it. Stumbling across bugs isn't so hard on its own. But writing down the steps taken to reproduce it takes some time and effort. Writing up bug reports takes as much skill as any other kind of writing, really - there's a need to be concise, precise, and clear. Also, a lot of policy issues seem to come up, when trying to decide how best to implement things. Those generate a lot of interesting discussions.

Meanwhile, to stop blathering meaninglessly and actually get to the original point of this entry...

So, 75k words later, I've managed to pinpoint a whole lot more holes in my setting. Now I'm working on filling them by doing a lot of thinking instead of writing. Once I figure everything out, I'll continue.

[members-only cut]

So, holes. Namely:
1. What exactly do I mean, everything in reality exists in layers?
2. What exactly is the spirit world, and how do the shamans get to it?
3. What's a shaman again? How are they different from regular people?
4. What are spirits? Which things have them? Where do they come from?
5. How is the dream realm related to the spirit realm? And where are they in relation to the physical realm?
6. If Charles is partly fae as he claims, what exactly is fae? Why can't he do what Aliacorba does?
7. What's the Great Cycle? How's it relate to the Great Mother? Where does this leave the Tainted?
8. What kinds of energy are there and how are they related to each other? Physical I know, but emotional? Life? Tainted? psychic? Other?
9. Do souls exist? If so, what are they in relation to everything else?
10. Amulets? Huh?

So basically, my setting has always been extremely flimsy. ;) Getting less so in the past week, though.

I saw a short cartoon film back in high school, called (I think) Flatlanders [from 1982]. Basically it was about a family of 2D objects living on a plane. One day, the protagonist (I can't remember what he was - a circle, a square, a triangle maybe...) meets a 3D object. Only, because the 2D object can only see in 2D, the 3D object looked like a circle. Furthermore, the circle just sort of magically appeared in the protagonist's house, and had a magical power of being able to make himself grow and shrink in size.

It wasn't a circle though. It was a sphere, intersecting the plane. And the sphere pulled the protagonist off of his plane and took him on a merry jaunt through a 3D world, then returned him safely back to his house where he spent the rest of his life trying to tell other people about all the wonders he saw, except they didn't believe him and thought he was mad.

So ... that's sort of the nutshell summary of the layers of reality in Fortress Launne. Each layer is like a different plane. The Vinithi shamans can see the ones nearest to the physical plane (a "realm") in addition to the physical plane, and they can also reach these other realms by walking to them. When they do, they disappear off the physical realm. Like a sphere going all the way through a 2D plane until it no longer intersects.

In Amulet I I've so far mentioned "dream realm" and "spirit realm" and "abyss." The shamans mostly walk to the spirit realm. I've decided that they can't reach the dream realm - not because they can't see it, and attempt to walk there, but because the environment is not conducive to life. Sort of like you could send a human to the moon without benefit of, say, a rocketship around them. However, the chances that they'll survive the trip are nonexistent, and even if they did somehow survive, they wouldn't last long on the moon, either.

So it is with the dream realm, which can only be reached by ... umm, dreaming. Shamans have to get there the same way as everyone else, and can't take their bodies with them.

Then there's spirits. Everything on the physical realm has one. There are also others that didn't originate on the physical realm, but can manifest there if they really want to.

Some of those become fae. And some of those fae blend with living creatures to form ... uh, whatever Charles' mother was. And then somehow got passed on to Charles. Who can't actually do any of the things that the Vinithi shamans can, because he's sort of the opposite thing - a spirit that originated from Somewhere Else and manifested permanently in the physical realm. While the shamans originate in the physical realm and can walk elsewhere. (Sort of. This one still needs work...)

There are more spirit realms than just the ones that the shamans can reach. For example, the spirit wolf pack of Temple are not on the same realm, though I need to go back and figure out exactly what the differences are at some later point.

There can be more dimensions beyond the 3D analog too. Souls, I've decided, when the bodies they're attached to die, leave the 3D analog as well and go off in some 4D direction, where not even the shamans can follow. Souls are sort of a type of spirit.

Then there's the whole thing with the Great Cycle. Which mostly refers to the great cycle of life and living in particular. Life energy, therefore, is generated by the Great Cycle. The Tainted, meanwhile, have stepped outside of the cycle; Tainted energy is the energy of death, and it comes from ... elsewhere. Some place dark and unspeakable, and possibly what will eventually spark any horror I try to do with this setting in the future.

There's also been the dynamic of light vs. shadow. The realm of the abyss is where shadows come from, and it's a place where darkness isn't just an absence of light, and shadows can be entities in their own rights.

My model for the Great Cycle has mostly been shaped by my lava lamp, I think. It has a very predictable cycle of what the lava does, from the time I turn the thing on, until the blob of lava no longer rises and just sits on the bottom.

I've named the stages. There's gestation, which is when the light is on but everything is still cold. There's birth, when the first tentacle of lava shoots out from the bottom, gets most of the way to the top, and instantly hardens. Infancy is the period after that, when nothing much happens while lava continues to heat up. Sometimes more spikes of lava shoot up and instantly harden, or the bottom disk tilts and causes the solid tubes to break and fall down. Childhood is when there are many small lava bubbles going up and down, while most of it is still solid or semisolid, and there's hills and peaks and up to three individual geysers putting up bubbles at the same time. Bubbles start getting gradually larger.

Adolescence begins when all of the lava at the bottom suddenly rises up together and goes up to the top of the lamp in a single column. Adolescence is the period of one single undulating central column, where sometimes it looks like it might break into a stalactite and stalagmite, but mostly doesn't.

Finally the thing reaches maturity. The column breaks up into blobs of lavas of all shapes and sizes. This then continues for a long time. Lava spends a lot more time at the top than bottom overall. At first everything moves up and down fairly quickly, but it gradually slows down after a while.

At senescence, the blobs have slowed down so they look like they're having trouble coming up with the energy to rise again, after falling to the bottom. They tend to have a distinct shape to them too, sort of like a 3D comma or an upside down teardrop where the end is sort of curved inward. Sometimes it will form a senescence column, which looks a lot like the adolescence column, though it doesn't last as long. Sometimes a column will seem to revive the lamp a bit, allowing for more time of "maturity" like activity.

Eventually, though, all the lava falls to the bottom and becomes one or two big blobs. Sometimes they'll continue trying to rise, in that they'll get up far enough to break contact with the bottom. But they only go up halfway if they're lucky before they start falling. Finally they just sit at the bottom, and their 'heads' continue to sink lower and lower. At that point, the show is over. I turn the lamp off.

Ummm. Anyway. To get back to the worldbuilding... so the Great Cycle is just like that, where each individual life of a creature is like a small blob of lava, going up and down in the lamp, over and over in many reincarnations. Eventually the cycle will run down, which will possibly generate all sorts of interesting horror stories later on down the line when my original Fortress Launne material has run out. That's not going to happen for a while, though.

I was also going to talk about energy. Physical energy is obvious - it's exactly the same kind people are familiar with, with lightning being the example in nature that comes to mind. Then there's life energy. Life generates it and radiates it as a part of the business of living. Tainted Ones feed off of this to stay animated, though they also transform it into something called Tainted energy, which they can use to do a number of things that living things can't. The original Tainting happened from ... "elsewhere." Outside of the Great Cycle. Something that is a symptom of the fact that things are running down, I think.

Then there's emotional energy, which is generated by souls. Spirits run on emotional energy. Then there's general run-of-the-mill psychic energy, which is basically the same as it is in the real world. Which at the moment I'm having some trouble distinguishing between the two, because I'm an empath and think of everything in terms of emotions, though I also know that it doesn't work that way for everyone.

And the Great Mother, which is the main deity that the Vinithi refer to all the time, is basically the same thing as Mother Nature. There's a duality to the world - God who created everything and Nature who runs it. This is pretty close to what I actually believe, though it doesn't translate exactly to the world of Fortress Launne. And I'm not sure if it'll ever actually come up to the point where I need to detail it out (though I've been wrong before...).

And now I've blathered longwindedly, and I'm still not even done covering everything I've come up with this week, but I'm going to stop now and go to bed.