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strange_aeonsI've just gotten out of the shower and am trying to avoid combing my hair, because right now I'm all warm and clean and once I've done that I'm going to have to go outside and get all cold and sweaty shoveling snow off the drive. Which is gravel and grass, by the way. And, like all my avoidance behaviors, this one involves a certain amount of intellectualism.
Anyone who's worked with me on a setting, or been subjected to any significant amount of one of my settings, will probably have noticed that two things keep coming up: miscegenation and eugenics. Now, I am a product of miscegenation even more than most USians, but it's not like I have some kind of weird hangup about it, as far as I know — however, after the third or fourth setting in which race A interbreeds with race B and thus produces enough viable, fertile offspring to found race C, it's reasonable to begin wondering if I'm plotting something. I'm not. I'm just not very creative. I like that device, so I keep coming back to it.
As for the eugenics, I grew up in a dog-breeding environment. Interacting with placenta on a regular basis from an early age will screw anyone up.
And miscegenation isn't always necessarily a good idea in my settings. In Life on Earth's, for example, people (and animals, but I'm not really talking about animals here) who are genetically compatible might not be so similar metaphysically, and in any offspring they produce, their patterns won't mesh properly. There's a flux period while the patterns try to reconcile, and in a few crossbreeds this period never ends — which is to say, it ends when their corpses decompose, which is usually not very damn long after conception. The majority of crossbreeds' patterns do settle down, sometimes with a little outside nudging (some bits of pattern can only be manipulated [at all, and/or with results that stick] during such a flux period, which is why crossbreeds are so useful to ... certain kinds of people; there are at least two slave-races in the WIP, numen batteries and doppelgängers, and both are derived from stock created by crossbreeding elves and humans).
A lot of the time the resultant pattern is simply not viable, but more often it's just really screwed up. This is not always totally metaphysical — a thing's pattern can exert quite a bit of control over its actual physical configuration, which is how magic, some of it, works. So Arunir, a half-elf, has problems that are entirely metaphysical (well, and psychological, but those she came by the old-fashioned way, by gum), but her full sister is funny-colored for metaphysical reasons but opthalmoplegic for genetic ones. Their father is from an exceedingly good, stable line (there's that eugenics!), which is the only reason they aren't completely hunchbacked and insane.
Sometimes these mutations are beneficial, but not often. Because I'm evil.
Okay, the shoveling wasn't so bad. For one thing, my roommate completely overreacted when she saw the snow on the front stairs, which is apparently not a good indication of the amount of snow there is on the actual ground, and on the lilac trees, which are bent to the ground with the weight but were floppy to begin with. Also, we'd gotten about half an inch of soft snow, then either a melt-and-refreeze or a bit of freezing rain, then three or four inches of even softer, very powdery snow. This is mad easy shoveling snow. I still had to shower again, though. That parka is a little too much. But my roommate made me some of the best scrambled eggs I've ever had — and I've had some damn good scrambled eggs in my time, but I think the eggs themselves were just really fresh — to compensate me for my time. I don't think she noticed I wrote 'wash me' on the hood of her van.
Where was I?
Miscegenation is also a pretty bad idea in the setting of the retelling of Beauty and the Beast I'm clearly not writing at the moment. (I need to work that setting over at some point in the future, because it's just not doing it for me, but this bit stays no matter what, because this is where Beasts come from. Incidentally, The Name of the Rose is apparently the most common title ever, which means I won't have to name the story that. Phew.)
Basically: supernatural traits aren't heritable, but they may effect a person on a genetic level. If such a person is still human enough to have a child by a normal human, the child may inherit genes that simply aren't viable when not backed by the appropriate supernatural traits. The Beast's body, for example, is just slowly falling apart, and her father, who is to blame for all this, has patched her up as best he can, but he's only delayed the inevitable.
Now that I've established that not every instance of interbreeding in my settings results in a race of magical superpeople, I'm going to ramble about one that does. Which was the point of this whole exercise. I do wish the power would stop going out, though. Saving every five minutes or so (I'm writing this in WordPad, which has no autosave, but is a damn sight better than the LiveJournal client I use, which has no save of any kind, as far as I can tell) prevents me from losing much, but it's still bloody annoying.
It occurred to me that I'd never had a high fantasy setting. Not in any traditional sense. The WIP is set a few centuries in what is very arguably our future, and the horses are mechanical, and the whole thing starts in a very science fictional dystopia, so that's right out. There's a campaign I want to run and its setting's got elves and magic in it, but the elves are basically the Technocracy, except steampunk, and the maps and bestiary are already done for me because it's set in the Eocene or thereabouts. Which is an idea I totally stole from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ursulav. It's not plagiarism, it's an homage. (I've been meaning to approach tienedreugan about picking his brain for GMing tips, actually, but I keep forgetting, or not being able to use my computer for a month. Somebody kick me about that, please.) The setting of the retelling mentioned above is sort of surreal urban fantasy, so it doesn't count either.
And then, reading a thread on the RPG.net forum, I ran across a campaign idea I absolutely had to ste— I mean, to homage, and the setting needed to be high fantasy. Here was my opportunity. That is to say, my excuse. So I've been turning this over in my head for a while, and this is what I've got:
There are gods. There are good gods and evil gods, which is going to be a problem later because I have trouble regarding 'good' and 'evil' as anything but nonsense words, but I need them for the story I want to run. Let's try this again: There are gods. There are benevolent gods, and there are gods that are right bastards. Gods aren't very hands-on as a rule, but they do create servants to do their bidding in the world. These servants aren't 'people' in the sense I usually use the word — they can acquire information but not learn in a meaningful way, and they can't grow beyond the purpose for which they are created, which is generally something along the lines of 'get me followers, bitch!'. However, some of them do have motivations, because they were built with motivations, and among those motivations may be the desire to have children, or one that translates in practical terms as such a desire.
They can't have children among themselves, so they do it with earthly creatures, generally earthly creatures associated with their god in some manner, or with humans, because as we all know, humans are totally neutral. D&D wouldn't lie to me! Any offspring resulting from such a union is potentially fertile with (a) any servant of the appropriate god, (b) any offspring of a servant of the appropriate god, or (c) any earthly creature of more or less the right sort. So if a servant of the sun-god has a child (or, well, possibly a clutch of children) by a crocodile, that child could go on to, uh, settle down and start a family with another servant of the sun-god, another child of a servant of the sun-god regardless of what the non-servant parent was (barring total physical incompatibility), or with any other sort of crocodilian.
Are you bored yet? Come on, own up! If you've even read this far!
Anyway, thus are a host of fantasy races created. In fact, I wonder if this sort of interbreeding isn't the source of all the mortal magic in this world — if you go back far enough, a lot of people are bound to have a god-servant in their lineage somewhere, presuming sufficiently numerous and/or promiscuous god-servants. That would be very tidy and aesthetically pleasing.
Right now I've got two races, aside from ye olde humanity. Elves, because there have to be elves. They're more human than most of these races are, but they have enough of the star-god's servants in them for it to show. They're vulnerable to iron; iron kills stars. (I said I was going to use that somewhere and dammit, I'll use it somewhere if it kills me!)
There're also the sun-god's people, alluded to above, who are lizardmen. I don't know what to call them yet, but I'm thinking of 'IHaveReadAndEnjoyedTheMokoleSupplementForWerewolf'. No? Too long? When you're dealing with a category as large as 'scaly ectotherms' (unscaly ectotherms belong to other gods), total physical incompatibility is going to come up as a problem on a fairly regular basis, so I'm thinking there's more than one strain of them. I'm deathly afraid that there be dragons. I don't think I've built a world with dragons in since I was eleven, and it's safe to say that at the time I was not in my right mind. This is so depressing. Anyway, the IHaveReadAndEnjoyedTheMokoleSupplementForWerewolf are pretty close to their god, venerate the pineal gland, can see through illusions, and are fiercely diurnal. And I think they like a good bodypaint.
And now it's time for dinner.
Anyone who's worked with me on a setting, or been subjected to any significant amount of one of my settings, will probably have noticed that two things keep coming up: miscegenation and eugenics. Now, I am a product of miscegenation even more than most USians, but it's not like I have some kind of weird hangup about it, as far as I know — however, after the third or fourth setting in which race A interbreeds with race B and thus produces enough viable, fertile offspring to found race C, it's reasonable to begin wondering if I'm plotting something. I'm not. I'm just not very creative. I like that device, so I keep coming back to it.
As for the eugenics, I grew up in a dog-breeding environment. Interacting with placenta on a regular basis from an early age will screw anyone up.
And miscegenation isn't always necessarily a good idea in my settings. In Life on Earth's, for example, people (and animals, but I'm not really talking about animals here) who are genetically compatible might not be so similar metaphysically, and in any offspring they produce, their patterns won't mesh properly. There's a flux period while the patterns try to reconcile, and in a few crossbreeds this period never ends — which is to say, it ends when their corpses decompose, which is usually not very damn long after conception. The majority of crossbreeds' patterns do settle down, sometimes with a little outside nudging (some bits of pattern can only be manipulated [at all, and/or with results that stick] during such a flux period, which is why crossbreeds are so useful to ... certain kinds of people; there are at least two slave-races in the WIP, numen batteries and doppelgängers, and both are derived from stock created by crossbreeding elves and humans).
A lot of the time the resultant pattern is simply not viable, but more often it's just really screwed up. This is not always totally metaphysical — a thing's pattern can exert quite a bit of control over its actual physical configuration, which is how magic, some of it, works. So Arunir, a half-elf, has problems that are entirely metaphysical (well, and psychological, but those she came by the old-fashioned way, by gum), but her full sister is funny-colored for metaphysical reasons but opthalmoplegic for genetic ones. Their father is from an exceedingly good, stable line (there's that eugenics!), which is the only reason they aren't completely hunchbacked and insane.
Sometimes these mutations are beneficial, but not often. Because I'm evil.
Okay, the shoveling wasn't so bad. For one thing, my roommate completely overreacted when she saw the snow on the front stairs, which is apparently not a good indication of the amount of snow there is on the actual ground, and on the lilac trees, which are bent to the ground with the weight but were floppy to begin with. Also, we'd gotten about half an inch of soft snow, then either a melt-and-refreeze or a bit of freezing rain, then three or four inches of even softer, very powdery snow. This is mad easy shoveling snow. I still had to shower again, though. That parka is a little too much. But my roommate made me some of the best scrambled eggs I've ever had — and I've had some damn good scrambled eggs in my time, but I think the eggs themselves were just really fresh — to compensate me for my time. I don't think she noticed I wrote 'wash me' on the hood of her van.
Where was I?
Miscegenation is also a pretty bad idea in the setting of the retelling of Beauty and the Beast I'm clearly not writing at the moment. (I need to work that setting over at some point in the future, because it's just not doing it for me, but this bit stays no matter what, because this is where Beasts come from. Incidentally, The Name of the Rose is apparently the most common title ever, which means I won't have to name the story that. Phew.)
Basically: supernatural traits aren't heritable, but they may effect a person on a genetic level. If such a person is still human enough to have a child by a normal human, the child may inherit genes that simply aren't viable when not backed by the appropriate supernatural traits. The Beast's body, for example, is just slowly falling apart, and her father, who is to blame for all this, has patched her up as best he can, but he's only delayed the inevitable.
Now that I've established that not every instance of interbreeding in my settings results in a race of magical superpeople, I'm going to ramble about one that does. Which was the point of this whole exercise. I do wish the power would stop going out, though. Saving every five minutes or so (I'm writing this in WordPad, which has no autosave, but is a damn sight better than the LiveJournal client I use, which has no save of any kind, as far as I can tell) prevents me from losing much, but it's still bloody annoying.
It occurred to me that I'd never had a high fantasy setting. Not in any traditional sense. The WIP is set a few centuries in what is very arguably our future, and the horses are mechanical, and the whole thing starts in a very science fictional dystopia, so that's right out. There's a campaign I want to run and its setting's got elves and magic in it, but the elves are basically the Technocracy, except steampunk, and the maps and bestiary are already done for me because it's set in the Eocene or thereabouts. Which is an idea I totally stole from
ursulav. It's not plagiarism, it's an homage. (I've been meaning to approach tienedreugan about picking his brain for GMing tips, actually, but I keep forgetting, or not being able to use my computer for a month. Somebody kick me about that, please.) The setting of the retelling mentioned above is sort of surreal urban fantasy, so it doesn't count either.And then, reading a thread on the RPG.net forum, I ran across a campaign idea I absolutely had to ste— I mean, to homage, and the setting needed to be high fantasy. Here was my opportunity. That is to say, my excuse. So I've been turning this over in my head for a while, and this is what I've got:
There are gods. There are good gods and evil gods, which is going to be a problem later because I have trouble regarding 'good' and 'evil' as anything but nonsense words, but I need them for the story I want to run. Let's try this again: There are gods. There are benevolent gods, and there are gods that are right bastards. Gods aren't very hands-on as a rule, but they do create servants to do their bidding in the world. These servants aren't 'people' in the sense I usually use the word — they can acquire information but not learn in a meaningful way, and they can't grow beyond the purpose for which they are created, which is generally something along the lines of 'get me followers, bitch!'. However, some of them do have motivations, because they were built with motivations, and among those motivations may be the desire to have children, or one that translates in practical terms as such a desire.
They can't have children among themselves, so they do it with earthly creatures, generally earthly creatures associated with their god in some manner, or with humans, because as we all know, humans are totally neutral. D&D wouldn't lie to me! Any offspring resulting from such a union is potentially fertile with (a) any servant of the appropriate god, (b) any offspring of a servant of the appropriate god, or (c) any earthly creature of more or less the right sort. So if a servant of the sun-god has a child (or, well, possibly a clutch of children) by a crocodile, that child could go on to, uh, settle down and start a family with another servant of the sun-god, another child of a servant of the sun-god regardless of what the non-servant parent was (barring total physical incompatibility), or with any other sort of crocodilian.
Are you bored yet? Come on, own up! If you've even read this far!
Anyway, thus are a host of fantasy races created. In fact, I wonder if this sort of interbreeding isn't the source of all the mortal magic in this world — if you go back far enough, a lot of people are bound to have a god-servant in their lineage somewhere, presuming sufficiently numerous and/or promiscuous god-servants. That would be very tidy and aesthetically pleasing.
Right now I've got two races, aside from ye olde humanity. Elves, because there have to be elves. They're more human than most of these races are, but they have enough of the star-god's servants in them for it to show. They're vulnerable to iron; iron kills stars. (I said I was going to use that somewhere and dammit, I'll use it somewhere if it kills me!)
There're also the sun-god's people, alluded to above, who are lizardmen. I don't know what to call them yet, but I'm thinking of 'IHaveReadAndEnjoyedTheMokoleSupplementForWerewolf'. No? Too long? When you're dealing with a category as large as 'scaly ectotherms' (unscaly ectotherms belong to other gods), total physical incompatibility is going to come up as a problem on a fairly regular basis, so I'm thinking there's more than one strain of them. I'm deathly afraid that there be dragons. I don't think I've built a world with dragons in since I was eleven, and it's safe to say that at the time I was not in my right mind. This is so depressing. Anyway, the IHaveReadAndEnjoyedTheMokoleSupplementForWerewolf are pretty close to their god, venerate the pineal gland, can see through illusions, and are fiercely diurnal. And I think they like a good bodypaint.
And now it's time for dinner.
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no subject
Date: 2002-12-25 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-12-25 09:04 pm (UTC)And thank you for the kicking. It was nice and vicious.