We are still making great progress on developing the shared world. Anyone new to this topic who would like the details, please call up all the related posts using the "Shared World" label at the bottom of this post. They each have extensive, interesting comments on them as well.
In an effort to get our main ideas so far about the Shared World project into a single place, I have made what I think is a reasonably easy document to look at. I'm not sure how useful it will really be, and there may be some stuff missing from it, but it seems like backtracking through all of our comments on the posts is getting rather cumbersome. Everyone involved in the shared world already, or anyone else who like to get in on it, is welcome to download this document from Box and look it over. (The document is a two-page PDF, with four columns that each run from one page to the next. That's not a great design, since I could have just made it one giant page, but it occurred to me that if someone wanted to print it, then it would work better split onto normal size pages.)
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Then let's continue the discussion in comments with attention to some of the areas that need it most, like, perhaps, aliens.
Then, as we make more decisions and refine some of the details, I will do additional updates to the main document and eventually use that as the basis for "official" writers guidelines for this universe. We've done so much so quickly that I suspect within a few weeks we will have a very well-imagined background and people can start thinking about what sort of stories they may want to tell.
5 comments:
It seems like we are really close to finalizing the ether issue. Once we pin down what that is all about, I'll update my previous timeline and extend it back to take into account some of the additional stuff we've discussed (printing press)... For Egypt, I imagine going back all the way to 2000-1200 bce, and even then we may want to suggest the print press has been around prior to this time?
I like tying the ether to some threat to earth, giving our aliens reason for uplifting us, but none of those ideas have sparked interest.
The post-organic concept seem more interesting, so that might be a good direction, and could allow for a scenario where they intervene at the beginning of our time-line and then return once we are technological enough to be more interesting. This could be a weird sort of altruism, self interest in the form of wanting new fledgling race to join them to keep their conglomerate fresh, to some weird alien religious thing.
Or, going back to a less well-thought out idea of mine, this alien race #1 is fleeing race #2 and they do a quick and dirty best effort to speed us toward technological society so that we have a fighting chance against the onslaught of race #2.
My one beef with this scenario is that marauder aliens of the sort in Starship Troopers always seemed boring.
Maybe aliens #1 are organics who see the post organics as blasphemous or essentially destroyers of 'real life' and that is their motivation.
Maybe they know that races living on more than one planet have greatly improved odds against what is coming. This would imply the ether is a created condition.
Last thought tonight, if we go with the proto-planet idea, maybe they are trying to give us a chance to survive the intermingling of the two star systems.
Alright... that's all I have tonight. :)
B
Ooh, a summary doc is great, thanks! I've been meaning to go back and read all your guys' posts on the various blogs so this is very cool. :)
~Merc
Cheers Christopher.
And i've enjoyed the discussions with everybody.
Brandon, at a glance, I am more or less into most of what you say above, but I am still not getting fired up about the aliens #1 versus the aliens #2 thing. Not that I'm against having 2 or more ET species, but I'm wondering if we want also to have to develop a vast backstory for two or more alien races. But I guess it doesn't have to be all laid out. A lot of it could be a mystery.
I dig the post-organic business and I think the alien involvement could for sure have something to do with the ether phenomenon in some way. I'll try to have a dream about it tonight.
Chris, sounds cool. I'm just throwing out ideas to see what sticks. :)
B
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