Universe Proposal (fantasy/AU)

[Somes J]

This is my attempt to put on a new spin on the old Midaeval fantasy genre, though the final result is not really Midaeval and I’m not sure it properly classifies as fantasy, as the universe has no magic. The laws of physics are the same here as they are in our universe. The setting is an alternate version of Earth. The general premise is inspired by Nemo Ramjet’s All Tomorrows.

I originally made this up because I was sick of seeing "generic Midaeval fantasy #9999", and then realized I'd come up with a fairly cohesive and interesting universe I wanted to explore. With luck, I hope to eventually get a published book or two out of it. In the mean time, it seems a good universe for Omniverse One, as I already have the basics mostly planned out.

Anyway, here is the outline. Please tell me what you think.

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THE SETTING:

The setting is an alternate universe version of Earth. This Earth diverged from our Earth very far back in the timeline, perhaps around the time of the Big Whack or the formation of the initial continental cratons (billions of years ago). It is significantly different from our Earth in geography and ecosystems. The planet has only a single continent, somewhat larger than Earth’s Australia. The continent is near the equator and has a warm climate and is largely covered by forest.

The divergence point is after the initial development of life, so life on alter-Earth and life on our Earth is biochemically compatible. However, multicellular life developed independently on alter-Earth and our Earth, so plants and animals are completely divergently evolved. The ecosystem of alter-Earth contains relatively few large animals, either as a result of a recent mass extinction or because life has simply advanced onto the land more recently than on our Earth.


THE PREMISE

The story of this setting begins not on alter-Earth, but on a different world altogether. This world was much more like our Earth. There a technological civilization had developed during the last ice age, probably during a mild glacial phase around 50-30,000 years ago. This civilization was built by a hominid species separately diverged from Homo Heidelberginis (the common ancestor of Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals). They developed a sedentary agricultural culture in the area that is now the East China and Yellow Seas (which was at the time above sea level), and eventually developed a technological society. Exploring the rest of the world, they discovered primitive hominids (including Homo Sapiens), and incorporated them into their society as slaves. They considered these creatures closer to domestic animals than humans, going so far as to breed new varieties as humans might with dogs or cattle, and later apply genetic modification to them.

Eventually, these hominids (call them the Masters) made an interesting discovery in the wilderness beyond their lands. A device, built by unknown hands many millions of years ago. It proved to be a gateway, through which Earths in parallel universes could be accessed.

Around this time, the civilization of the Masters collapsed in a massive war. A small faction of them tried to escape through the gateway, burying its opposite number terminal in the alter-Earth behind them so nobody could follow them, and taking a small number of slaves with them. Unfortunately for them, some of the human slaves saw that the Masters were vulnerable, and led a revolt. The rebellious slaves slaughtered many of the Masters, trashed their gear, and escaped into the wilderness. The surviving Masters gradually died out, succumbing to a combination of starvation, ennui, inbreeding, and being genetically absorbed by or actively hunted and killed by their former slaves. A fate that paralleled the one they were suffering on Earth, though of course they did not know this*.
The descendants of the slaves learned to survive in alter-Earth’s wilds and spread out over its single continent. Faced with a world with no large animals, the various slave races evolved to fill the various empty ecological niches they found.

* I’m considering unifying this setting with another setting I have a vague concept for, which is my take on how you might have an Atlantis-type civilization having actually existed without totally raping historical plausibility. Hence stuff like the Masters’ civilization being in an area of coastal China that’s now under the East China Sea.


THE RACES

HUMANS*

The descendants of the unprepossessing skinny, weak hominids found by the Masters in Africa and Europe, which they enslaved and used for a variety of tasks. When some of the last of the Masters fled to the alter-Earth, it was a human who lead the revolt and subsequent escape into the wilderness. The humans were forced, again, to survive as hunter-gatherers. Agriculture has recently re-emerged among them, and today the live in a relatively low-level agricultural village society.

Urbanization and technology levels remain low. This is mostly a society of more-or-less self-sufficient villages practicing subsistence agriculture. There is some trade, but not huge amounts. The place remains highly fragmented politically; pretty much every village is its own tiny state. Technology is still Neolithic, with tools of stone, wood, and bone.

* Pretty much every race will probably consider itself “human” or “people” so I really do need to come up with names that other races would use for humans. Killer People would probably call most of the different races some variant of “prey” or “food”. I think the Forest People might call humans “Brown People”, as I envision them as more dark-skinned while the Forest People are more light-skinned. On the other hand, the term has some rather unfortunate resonances in English.


FOREST PEOPLE

Originally, these people were the Masters’ favored subjects. They were bred as pets, household servants, and sex slaves. The Masters changed their bodies and minds to make them more suitable for that role. They reduced their natural aggression and independence. Their bodies were stunted and reduced so that they would not be a threat in the unlikely event that they ever became rebellious. The Masters even changed them to make them tidier and lower maintenance. Their immune systems were enhanced to keep them free of disease and even the growth patterns of their hair and fingernails were changed so they would not have to be trimmed. Even their maturation period was reduced, until they reached physical adulthood by age 8-10, so that they would not experience such a long and troublesome growing period.

To a human their lot in life under the Masters would seem degrading, but in fact they were the happiest people in the history of humanity. Their work was light, they wanted for nothing, and for the most part they had no reason to consider their servitude unpleasant. What for the humans was liberation was for them a time of sorrow. For the first time they knew hunger, cold and heat, death from injury and disease, and the fear of being hunted. Conditions their bodies, as pampered and twisted as those of designer goldfish, were ill-prepared to handle. So terrible was the trauma of that event that tens of thousands of years later they still remember it, and still resent the humans whose ancestors they remember as those who destroyed their paradise. Still, they learned to survive, and in time they multiplied and spread over the world. Today they exist as nomadic bands of subsistence foragers, living in the lands that are inaccessible to humans or that they do not want. Hence the human term for them.

To human eyes, the Forest People would look uncannily handsome, if they didn’t also look disturbingly childlike. Their skin is smooth, their bodies are smooth, muscular, and well-proportioned, and their faces are similarly engineered to approximate ideal proportions and features. But they are quite neotenous, retaining a rather childlike appearance and “immature” features such as lack of facial and body hair, and they are physically small, coming about to a typical human’s chest. These changes were inflicted on them by the Masters to make them less of a physical threat, as they were allowed closer access to the Masters than any of their other slave races.


GRAZERS

Brainless, powerful hominids created by the Masters as grunt labor. Modified to survive on low-quality diets, they have assumed roughly the ecological niche of deer. With no stimulation, their already artificially numbed brains have atrophied even further, and they are totally subsapient. In a ghoulish irony, they are a staple food of many of the other hominids.


KILLER PEOPLE

During the height of their civilization, the Master elite used to amuse themselves with decadent, sadistic blood-sports involving other hominids. In time, even this failed to sufficiently amuse them, and they set about creating a creature that would prove more of a challenge. They took humans and twisted them, increasing their strength and aggression and grafting in genes from predatory beasts. And so the ancestors of the Killer People were created.

After the rebellion, these creatures’ attributes left them perfectly positioned to move into the niche of apex predator, and from there their evolution took a ghoulish turn. With no other large animals around they evolved specifically to prey on other hominids. On Earth, such creatures were the creations of human nightmares, but on alter-Earth they were all too real.

Chiefly, the Killer People prey on the mindless Grazers, but they will attack other hominids when the opportunity arises. Roving bands of Killer People haunt the dark forests, falling upon any unwary traveler. When they see the opportunity, they will attack tribes of Forest People or caravans and villages of humans. In many ways, they can be compared to the bandits and raiders that troubled many human civilizations on Earth, but here the old story takes a ghoulish twist, for when they seize a caravan or overrun a village the inhabitants know they can almost never expect any mercy. Their fate is to be killed to the last and their flesh consumed in a horrifying feast.

Though they seem the stuff of nightmares and gruesome legends, the Killer People are not totally beyond reasoning with. They can often be persuaded to not attack a village with bribes of meat, alcohol, skins, tools, and other goods. The danger, as always with paying off an extortionist, is that the size of bribe required will tend to rise with time, and then there is the question of what might happen if one is unable to pay up. The humans make occasional attempts to eliminate them militarily, but their scattered nature makes it extremely difficult to hunt them down. They are generally a disorganized rabble, living in small bands dominated by “Big Men”.

The Killer People resemble hulking, brutish humans with lantern jaws. Their faces are hairless, so that they do not become soiled with blood and gore during their meals. Their powerful jaws are filled with sharp stabbing teeth, and their fingernails have been modified into claws. Their language is made up entirely of clicks and whistling sounds, designed to imitate the sounds of the wind and breaking twigs so as not to spook prey.


BLIND PEOPLE

On the alter-Earth, there exists a great cave system, larger than any on Earth. This cave system boasts a unique, lightless ecology, dense enough to support human foragers. Tens of thousands of years ago, humans moved into this cave system. Some stayed near the surface and they became the Cave People. Others were pushed into the deep, lightless interior by the increasing population. There, they were forced to adapt to a world cut off from any natural light. Worse, there was a predator that lived in the deep caves that use bioluminescence to find mates and was naturally drawn to any light. Far from driving away dangerous animals, fire drew them, and so it had to be used as sparingly as possible. The Blind People were forced to adapt to a largely lightless world.

Over time, they learned to carry out all the necessary actions of life in the darkness, with only touch, hearing, and smell to guide them. Over time their hearing and smell became sharper. The skins of their hands became extremely sensitive, as they now functioned as a primary organ of perception. Their bodies changed to become more adapted to the environment of the caves. In the mean time, their eyes atrophied, as they were no longer useful to them.
The first immediate notable feature of the Blind People is that they are essentially albinos. Their skin is pale to the point of transparency and their hair is white. Their most distinguishing feature is their eerie lack of eyes. Their faces are shaped like that of a human, but where a human has eyes they have only two sockets covered by skin. They actually do still have eyes, but their eyelids have fused closed, leaving them unable to see anything more than changes in light and darkness. Beneath this permanent blindfold the eyes are radically atrophied, so that even without it they wouldn’t be able to see much of anything. They primarily “see” with their hands, while using their ears and noses to get information about the world beyond their arm’s reach. They naturally cling to walls and are rather agoraphobic. They live as foragers in the deep caves, surviving mostly on the fungi and small animals that live there.


CAVE PEOPLE

The Cave People are relatives of the Blind People, but they did not venture so far into the caves. They remained close to the surface, where the outside world was still close at hand and where the light-drawn deep cave predators did not venture. They became extremely pale over time, and their eyes adapted to see in low light, but their evolution was nowhere near as radical as that of the Blind People.

In time they learned to cultivate fungi, and became agriculturalists. The crowded conditions of the caverns naturally led to rapid urbanization. They were fortunate to have available to them plentiful veins of coal and various metal ores, and these resources fueled relatively rapid technological advance. The Cave People have become the most technologically sophisticated race on alter-Earth. While the rest of the world is Neolithic they have developed iron forging, and they are also the only society to have yet developed a written language. They are, however, a relatively insular society for the most part, self-sufficient and little concerned with affairs beyond their caves, so these inventions have not had a chance to become widely disseminated as yet.

Their main interest in the outside world lies in acquiring slaves, which they use to perform some of the more unpleasant work of their society, such as mining. These slaves are chiefly taken from among the Blind People of the deeper caverns, although as slaves the Blind People are somewhat hampered in many jobs by their inability to see. For this reason, their main interest in the world beyond their caverns lies in securing some captives of other races with functional eyes. Being poorly adapted to function beyond their caves themselves, they will usually collect such slaves by bribing the Killer People to bring them live captives, paying them off with meat, alcohol, and tools (especially iron tools). What trickle of captives arrives in their domains this way mostly consists of Forest People; human communities are distant from the great caves, so a human captive is very unusual and exotic.

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PS, what do you think I should call this universe? The best thing I can think of is "Children of Man", but that sounds a little too much like Children of Men...

[speaker-to-trolls]

Edit: Hello Somes J and welcome to the glorious new board, sorry I didn't notice your introductory post in the other forum and realise who you were.

For whatever my opinions worth I heartily endorse this product, I liked the bifurcation of humanity in All Tomorrows (Modular People for teh win) and this definitely has some of the same themes, could be an excellent setting once a few more details are clarified. Interesting also that at first glance there are a lot of the same themes as the medieval fantasy you talked about, the humans running the main surface civilisation, wandering peaceful 'elves', marauding, flesh eating 'orcs' and weird, fae creatures living in the dark beneath the Earth.

Incidentally, I do have one small problem: in the bit about Killer People you used the phrase 'takes a ghoulish twist' or 'takes on a ghoulish turn' a few times more than was strictly necessary, in my opinion

[Somes J]

For whatever my opinions worth I heartily endorse this product, I liked the bifurcation of humanity in All Tomorrows (Modular People for teh win) and this definitely has some of the same themes, could be an excellent setting once a few more details are clarified.

Thanks, I'm glad you like it.

Interesting also that at first glance there are a lot of the same themes as the medieval fantasy you talked about, the humans running the main surface civilisation, wandering peaceful 'elves', marauding, flesh eating 'orcs' and weird, fae creatures living in the dark beneath the Earth.

That's odd, I was doing anything but raiding fantasy tropes for inspiration (I was kind of consciously trying to get away from them). The Forest People were inspired by the Hedonists in Nemo Ramjet's All Tomorrows (I certainly wasn't thinking "Elves" when I designed them), and the Killer People were more inspired by a combination of Blindsight vampires and the "Elf-folk" hominids in Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Origin, along with some of my own boredom-fueled musings on how odd it was that so many horror movies critters and legendary ghoulies were vaguely humanoid, as if we had some kind of instinctual fear of a human-like creature from deep in our evolutionary past. I wasn't thinking "Fey" when I came up with the Cave People either, though now that you pointed it out I can see the parallel.

I can't decide whether the archetypes are so pervasive they just sunk into my subconscious, or whether it's because you were thinking in terms of Midaeval fantasy so you naturally started cross-correlating my races with standard fantasy ones. Interestingly, the one you didn't pick out was the Blind People, who were probably the closest thing to a straight-up homage of All Tomorrows in there.

Incidentally, I do have one small problem: in the bit about Killer People you used the phrase 'takes a ghoulish twist' or 'takes on a ghoulish turn' a few times more than was strictly necessary, in my opinion

You're right, I thought it sounded kind of purple-prosy myself too. I'll definitely have to do some revision for the final draft.

[Mobius 1]

While the names are unintentionally humourous, I'm also behind this product. It's not often you see a fantasy world that's not medieval or romanesque (cue Shroom with the 10,000, BC jokes), but this I can dig - especially the blind people. A couple questions, though:

Being a man who's ultimately most interesting in the plot/direction the worldbuilding setting takes, are there any plot bunnies you have that could potentially change the dynamic of the verse?

Are there any Masters still floating around? Obviously, there existence in the New World after their downfall would make pretty interesting drama, be it antagonistic or with a new view on life (having your civilization blown up before you can humble you a bit) - or both?

How organized are the Killer People? While their violent nature might prevent something of an alliance, a particuarly strong and charismatic "Big Man" could pull quite a few tribes until his thumb and make life hell for the forest people or even the cave dudes if he's willing to aggressively expand.

Just how uncongenial are the forest and cave people towards each other (I promise I won't make elves vs dwarves jokes)? It's obvious the Cave people have a pretty robust slave system going, but has any meaningful contact been established between the two groups?

Oh, and with the Blind People comes the requirement of giant evil hungry pink worm monsters a la Gears of War or King Kong. Just saying, as it'd be totally awesome.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to what you put up in your forum.

[Somes J]

Are there any Masters still floating around? Obviously, there existence in the New World after their downfall would make pretty interesting drama, be it antagonistic or with a new view on life (having your civilization blown up before you can humble you a bit) - or both?

Homo Asiaticus (so named because they were originally a branch of Homo Heidelberginis that moved into East Asia maybe half a million years ago) is functionally extinct on both ChoM-verse Earth and ChoM World. That said, they did have bio-immortality tech, so it's fascinating to imagine some individuals managing to survive till the present day on both worlds.

Actually, I have an idea for a novel I hope to write in the setting some day, that concerns a Master survivor woken up from suspended animation attempting to re-establish her civilization, using the contents of her small base (which contains, among other things, enough genetic samples to re-establish the Masters as a viable species).

How organized are the Killer People? While their violent nature might prevent something of an alliance, a particuarly strong and charismatic "Big Man" could pull quite a few tribes until his thumb and make life hell for the forest people or even the cave dudes if he's willing to aggressively expand.

They're mostly operating on a level of individual bands, but you'll periodically get temporary alliances. Yeah, the possibility that somebody might come along and start organizing them is definitely something to consider. Actually, in the aforementioned novel, one of the things I can see the resurrected Master doing is trying to make an army for herself by trying to organize the Killer People. The biggest problem with doing it is they don't really have a military mindset. They're natural raiders; think in terms of "hunts", not "campaigns".

Just how uncongenial are the forest and cave people towards each other (I promise I won't make elves vs dwarves jokes)? It's obvious the Cave people have a pretty robust slave system going, but has any meaningful contact been established between the two groups?

Not much. The Cave People really don't like being outside (the sun hurts their eyes, for starters, and they sunburn really easily since they're basically albinos). What slaves they get from the outside they get by going to some Killer People headman and going "hey, if the next time you attack these guys you leave a couple of guys alive and bring them to us, we'll give you a big pot of beer and some iron knives."

Oh, and with the Blind People comes the requirement of giant evil hungry pink worm monsters a la Gears of War or King Kong. Just saying, as it'd be totally awesome.

Hmm, I'll have to think about that.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to what you put up in your forum.

Thanks. I have started putting up some stuff in the Children of Man forum.

[Somes J]

If you're interested, the entry for the Blind People is up (link).