Random Worldbuilding Ideas of Yours

[Somes J]

I often have random ideas for stuff pop into my head; stuff I can't fit very well into any of my serious worldbuilding projects and which will probably go nowhere, but which I find conceptually intriguing anyway. I'm sure other people have similar things happen to them. So, what ideas like that have you had?

I'll start with one of my recent ones:

Aztec Mosquito Vampires

An idea I came up for a vampire civilization. These aren't your traditional vampires, rather they are like mosquitos. Mosquitos don't drink blood as their normal diet. Normally they feed on other stuff, but the females need blood for their young to grow, so they drink while pregnant. Similarly, the AMVs normally have the same kind of lifestyle as normal humans. However, when their females become pregnant, they acquire a ravenous hunger for human blood. The blood must come from a different race (the AMVs have stuff in their blood that renders their own blood unsuitable for the purpose; an evolutionary development designed to prevent their pregnant females from attacking their own kind). If they do not get blood, the pregnancy will miscarry. It may be because they can't synthesize some chemical or because of some magic-based factor, I never bothered to decide with. If a pregnant "hungry" AMV female catches the scent of the body odor of a non-AMV she will instinctively attack him and rip open his throat with specialized incisors. The taste of blood sends her into a state of frenzied orgasmic excstacy, and she will keep ripping at the poor guy's throat until every last drop of that sweet, sweet blood is gone. Needless to say, the process is invariably fatal to the unwilling "donor". They require one such "feeding" per embryo they are carrying (normally only one is necessary, but if they're carrying twins they'll need to feed twice etc.).

As the AMVs developed an urbanized agricultural civilization, this need for human victims in order to reproduce became increasingly problematic. Today, much of their society is arranged around the need for such human sacrifices. The AMVs will regularly send out armies to attack the neighboring human kingdoms. The purpose of such campaigns is not any conventional military objectives, but simply to capture large numbers of humans so that they can be taken back to the AMV's city. There, the captives are dragged up the huge pyramidal temple that dominates the city; the temple to the AMV's fertility goddess. On the other side of the pyramid, there's a line of pregnant women going up to the top of the temple to feed...

[Artemis]

That's a thoroughly terrifying idea, Somes. How would you go about killing one of these things?

[Siege]

Interesting idea, though perhaps not as unique as you may have hoped. In the China Mieville novel The Scar the reader is introduced to the remnants of the Malarial Queendom. The Queendom was ruled by a species of mosquito people who terrorized much of a continent. The men aren't so bad (they sustain themselves with plant juices) but the female ruling class requires blood for sustenance and can suck a human dry in seconds. The Queendom was eventually overthrown and the remnants of the species are quarantined on a single island. It's not so bad for the men, but the women have collectively gone pretty much insane with ravenous hunger.

Did I mention Mieville's Bas-Lag novels are a pretty fucked-up setting?

[Somes J]

That's a thoroughly terrifying idea, Somes. How would you go about killing one of these things?

Thanks. Well, I see them as being more humans with an odd biological quirk than traditional undead type vampires, so they should be about as mortal as we are.

Interesting idea, though perhaps not as unique as you may have hoped. In the China Mieville novel The Scar the reader is introduced to the remnants of the Malarial Queendom. The Queendom was ruled by a species of mosquito people who terrorized much of a continent. The men aren't so bad (they sustain themselves with plant juices) but the female ruling class requires blood for sustenance and can suck a human dry in seconds. The Queendom was eventually overthrown and the remnants of the species are quarantined on a single island. It's not so bad for the men, but the women have collectively gone pretty much insane with ravenous hunger.

Did I mention Mieville's Bas-Lag novels are a pretty fucked-up setting?

The more I hear about that book the more I want to check it out sometime.

[Destructionator]

I've had several little things that I never develop for various reasons; maybe the idea is to vague, maybe it doesn't fit into my existing setting, or maybe I'm just too lazy.

The random notes thread in my verse is large and unorganized, but has some ideas I've seen other people have or had myself that I find cool, but never fleshed out:
http://www.omniverseone.com/forum/viewt ... ?f=9&t=125

A few that come to mind now though are:

1) An intelligent avian species. I want to do it so badly! Birds are the fucking tits.

2) Sexual cannibalism in an alien. Someone on SDN a little while back made a fascinating post about a species with extreme sexual dimorphism that would include the occasional cannibalistic sacrifice.

Take that to the next level though: the female devours the male! hahhahahah ehehehehehehe hohhohohoh the word devour is so hilarious!!!

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oh my god

ok composing self

But seriously, some species of spiders and IIRC insects have such behaviour. What if it was common in an intelligent race as well?

There's really all kinds of weird stuff you can get into with sex that would be fun to explore.

3) There's so much I could do with my existing magic system that it warrants its own forked world at some point. It has been extremely neglected of late, especially since the switch to harder science a few years back. Sometimes animal like patterns arise in the magical field. These patterns are usually destroyed without a second thought. Is that horribly unethical?

4) Plants. I dunno what exactly; I'm sure I've discussed it in my random thread at least a little, but plants. Plants are at least as awesome as birds.

edit: 5) And of course, Lavos. I started going into this on libarc a few months back: http://libriumarcana.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6081 /edit


I also did a thread a while ago with bad and silly ideas for worlds in general:
http://www.omniverseone.com/forum/viewt ... ?f=4&t=226

[Somes J]

2) Sexual cannibalism in an alien. Someone on SDN a little while back made a fascinating post about a species with extreme sexual dimorphism that would include the occasional cannibalistic sacrifice.

Take that to the next level though: the female devours the male! hahhahahah ehehehehehehe hohhohohoh the word devour is so hilarious!!!

That actually reminds me of an idea for an alien I'll probably incorporate into my hard space SF universe, which I was inspired to think of in the SDN "making alien aliens" thread.

The Shepherds are a species with a relatively unusual reproductive pattern. Females of the species lack any means for the infants to escape their bodies. In order to escape, the infants must literally tear their way out of the body of the female, killing the female in the process. This is similar to certain flies on Earth. Obviously, litter sizes among them must be relatively large, as each female can reproduce only once.

Shepherd males and females exhibit extreme sexual dismorphism. Shepherd females are large, relatively mindless quadrupedal creatures. Shepherd males are much smaller bipedal tool-users. Only the males are sapient. The sex-differentiation gene in Shepherds is recessive, so females outnumber males two to one.

The Shepherds take their name from their unusual social arrangment. They exist at a relatively primitive Stone Age level, as pastoral nomads. Their "cattle" are their own subsapient females. The sapient male Shepherds tend and feed these "Sheep", lead them to water, and drive away predators that might attack them. In exchange, when the time comes to reproduce the Shepherds will select a "Sheep" out of the herd and impregnate it, in much the same way that a human farmer might select a cow or sheep to be butchered.

Besides using them for reproduction, the Shepherds have learned to make extensive use of their "Sheep". They will occasionally supplement their diet by tapping the veins of the Sheep and drinking their blood. They make shelters, bags, and clothing from their hides and tools and musical instruments from their bones. In lean times, they will occasionally slaughter some for meat, and the birth of a new Shepherd is celebrated by a special feast of the flesh of the Sheep that has died to bring it into the world.

This unusual life cycle, in which one must die for another to be brought to life, has visibly influenced the primitive religions of the Shepherds. Some of them believe in a creator god that died to bring the world or the first Shepherds into existence. Others practice "human" sacrifice, believing that the gods do favors for mortals in exchange for blood or lives, in a mirror-image of the symbioses the Shepherds share with their "Sheep".

One of my better ideas, I think. Their "herding" would seem ridiculously creepy to us, though it's really no more evil than what we've done with our own domestic animals historically. It's just that the "animal" in question is their own (subsapient) opposite gender.

[Destructionator]

That actually reminds me of an idea for an alien I'll probably incorporate into my hard space SF universe, which I was inspired to think of in the SDN "making alien aliens" thread.
[...]
One of my better ideas, I think. Their "herding" would seem ridiculously creepy to us, though it's really no more evil than what we've done with our own domestic animals historically. It's just that the "animal" in question is their own (subsapient) opposite gender.

Yes, that is the exact post I was thinking about. I love the idea entirely.

[speaker-to-trolls]

I like the idea of a species which, like most species of insects, spends the majority of its life as infants, with adulthood as a brief period at the end of ones life when one mates then dies. How does such a creature develope intelligence? Well for one thing it's possible that greater larval intelligence is somehow useful to the larva, but since they aren't adults for very long intelligence in the breeder stage is not selected for. This is a bit of a stretch, I know, since it requires evolution be driven by the larva setting themselves up for mating for years on end before having a brief stab at genetic payoff.
One idea I had is that once one becomes an adult, all ones larval friends could cover one in some kind of distinguishing pageantry and then follow one around killing any rival adults of the same sex.

Another idea is aphid people, I'd call them Green Women. I know Siegetanks latest article in TSW makes note of an Aphid Imperium, so that might be based on the same idea. In any case, what I mean by aphid people is people who, like aphids, reproduce at a terrifying rate because they can reproduce by parthenogenesis, and can in fact produce daughters who are already pregnant at birth! Like aphids they have a secondary method of reproduction where one Green Woman becomes 'male' and mixes his/her genes with a green woman who is still female, this prevents them becoming completely sterile, but since their primary method is parthenogenesis this method is reserved for contact between tribes, otherwise it'd be pretty pointless, since they're all so similar. In fact a male-female mating would probably represent a major diplomatic event between two Green Woman nations.
One important thing to not is that I envisage Green Women as being every bit as smart and complicated as humans, they just also happen to be an innumerable, immaculately conceived horde which needs to devour all in its path.

[Destructionator]

Something to keep in mind with making new life forms is reproductive rates are more limited by the environment than the creature's biology.

You have have annual litters of 100 babies from each individual, making you think the population would be absurdly high, but the actual growth will limited by food supply and such - odds are about 98 or 99 of each of those hundred will starve to death or otherwise meet a grisly premature end when their local ecosystem fails.

[Somes J]

I like the idea of a species which, like most species of insects, spends the majority of its life as infants, with adulthood as a brief period at the end of ones life when one mates then dies. How does such a creature develope intelligence? Well for one thing it's possible that greater larval intelligence is somehow useful to the larva, but since they aren't adults for very long intelligence in the breeder stage is not selected for. This is a bit of a stretch, I know, since it requires evolution be driven by the larva setting themselves up for mating for years on end before having a brief stab at genetic payoff.

I remember a program I watched once that mentioned a type of insect (I forget which species) where the adults didn't even have mouthparts. They can't eat! They mate, reproduce, and then starve to death. Heck, I think there's even a mammal (some type of squirrel or something) where when the males hit puberty they go into a state of sex-crazed madness where they do nothing but screw females. They become so obssessed with sex they don't bother to take care of their own needs at all, and eventually they starve to death. Sort of like 28 Days Later infecteds, only with hornyness instead of agression.

I think an intelligent species that evolved from something like this would be quite interesting. They might have a very long "childhood" (say, maybe 40-50 years or something like that), and then they reach "old age" where they turn into the adult form, reproduce, and then die. One thing that occurs to me is, if they're like those insects where the adults can't eat, what's going to happen when they develop the technology to feed people intravenously? Maybe some people would want to use it to keep their old ones alive, while others might regard that as unnatural and blasphemy? Could be quite a controversy.

Alternatively, when they develop modern medicine one of the first things they might research is finding a hormonal supplement that will stop the transformation into an adult, so they can live longer. Of course, if this happens in, say their equivalent of the 1950s or something it creates a major problem, as they wouldn't have the tech to make artificial wombs yet, so some people would still have to become adults to keep the species alive. That would be a real interesting dillemma. What to do with a situation like that? Surpress the pill? Only allow some people to take it? And if so, who do you sacrifice to perpetuate the species? Criminals? People randomly picked by lottery?

Something to keep in mind with making new life forms is reproductive rates are more limited by the environment than the creature's biology.

You have have annual litters of 100 babies from each individual, making you think the population would be absurdly high, but the actual growth will limited by food supply and such - odds are about 98 or 99 of each of those hundred will starve to death or otherwise meet a grisly premature end when their local ecosystem fails.

Very true. Also, I suspect realistically an intelligent species is pretty much always going to be a K strategist (has few offspring and invests a great deal of effort in them). Spewing out a huge horde of babies and hoping one or two manage to survive isn't really a lifestyle likely to encourage high intelligence. For starters more intelligent creatures will probably mature slower (more brain development is required), and then there's the fact that R strategy is usually associated with creatures that don't care for their young, or care for them very little, which isn't the sort of strategy that naturally lends itself to spending years passing on your learned skills to your offspring.

Although I suppose you could think of a relatively plausible-sounding sapient R strategist, if you thought hard enough.

[Siege]

They might have a very long "childhood" (say, maybe 40-50 years or something like that), and then they reach "old age" where they turn into the adult form, reproduce, and then die.

Though wouldn't evolution tend to favor those who don't die right away, but survive for slightly longer, thus allowing them to reproduce more? Or for that matter, those who mature slightly faster, and live slightly longer, before dying?

To only begin reproduction after 40 years have passed sounds like a really bizarre evolutionary strategy to me.

[Somes J]

Though wouldn't evolution tend to favor those who don't die right away, but survive for slightly longer, thus allowing them to reproduce more? Or for that matter, those who mature slightly faster, and live slightly longer, before dying?

To only begin reproduction after 40 years have passed sounds like a really bizarre evolutionary strategy to me.

Well, there are species where the adult stage is very short-lived as in RL, so that side is fairly sound. Good point about the long childhood though.

Hmm, what about if it's related to the fact that an intelligent species is likely to have very dependant young? Obviously, the parents can't take care of them; they'd have to be raised by younger members of the tribe. This would require a pre-adult period long enough for the older "children" to raise the younger ones until they're able to survive on their own. So you might get three life-phases: child, caretaker, and breeder (sort of like Pak Protectors, but with the protector and breeder stages reversed). Figure the child stage needs to be around 15 years or so, judging by the example of humans, and the caretaker stage would then logically be another 15 years or so. That would give you the adult stage at around 30. That's a rather short-lived species, but might be just long-lived enough to be able to develop a technological civilization.

[Destructionator]

A general note first: any species with a metamorphosis would make a cool alien.

I remember a program I watched once that mentioned a type of insect (I forget which species) where the adults didn't even have mouthparts.

I seem to remember a species of the dragonfly to be like that. I'm not sure about that though; it was a cool fact pointed out to me in a high school biology nature walk, which was some years ago.

Whatever it was anyway, the one I saw was a fairly large insect that hangs out around swamps. It survived only on the stored food inside its body and looked much more threatening than it actually was.

Very true. Also, I suspect realistically an intelligent species is pretty much always going to be a K strategist (has few offspring and invests a great deal of effort in them).
[...]
Although I suppose you could think of a relatively plausible-sounding sapient R strategist, if you thought hard enough.

Indeed.


I sort of hit this problem in my TSW/ase thread. I wanted to eliminate humans there and replace them with something different for the fun of it.

To make them different, I went with a relatively short lived animal which has litters of about six, with the expectation that most would be lost before growing up. I think they are perfectly cool animals.

The problem is when I tried to write out a pathway for technological development, I didn't find it very believable, even with the allowances I did make.


What I think I'm going to run with though is having them be helped along by an external species, something which is possible in both nature and science fiction.

In nature, you might have a symbiosis. Perhaps another species helps the one along. Your animal has the potential to learn, but isn't likely to be taught by his own species and instead is trained and bred for intelligence by another species.

Something like a man and dog relationship perhaps. For this to work, they need to complement each other. For intelligence, perhaps one can learn and teach while the other does research; academics and scribes being different species, but working together naturally.

[Somes J]

I wonder if it would be possible to have a system where the parents can somehow directly transmit knowledge to the offspring. That might allow sapient R strategists to work, since they'd be born with a full set of skills and wouldn't need parenting.

One idea might be to have a race sort of like the Super Happy People in this story. They communicate by sex (exchanging bodily fluids which contain their memories). Maybe you could have an alien that lays hundreds of eggs, and before it lays them it whips up a cocktail of neurotransmitters containing all the memories it wants to pass on to the offspring and puts it into the eggs. When they young reach adulthood, they have the memories given to them by the parent.

Hmm, that might be an interesting idea I might use at some point. An alien species that communicates by exchanging bodily fluids and directly passes on its memories to its offspring in such a manner before they're born.

Hmm, since such a species would be constantly swapping memories it seems to me like this might be a good way to have a relatively realistic species with a natural hive mind. It's not exactly the Borg, but it'd be close: they'd swap memories so often they might not have any real sense of individuality.

And the Baby Eaters, from the same story, are sapient R strategists with an incredibly alien (and by human standards incredibly screwed up) social system.

The alien holos showed tall crystalline insectile creatures, all flat planes and intersecting angles and prismatic refractions, propelling themselves over a field of sharp rocks: the aliens moved like hopping on pogo sticks, bouncing off the ground using projecting limbs that sank into their bodies and then rebounded. There was a cold beauty to the aliens' crystal bodies and their twisting rotating motions, like screensavers taking on sentient form.

And the aliens bounded over the sharp rocks toward tiny fleeing figures like delicate spherical snowflakes, and grabbed them with pincers, and put them in their mouths. It was a central theme in holo after holo.

The alien brain was much smaller and denser than a human's. The alien children, though their bodies were tiny, had full-sized brains. They could talk. They protested as they were eaten, in the flickering internal lights that the aliens used to communicate. They screamed as they vanished into the adult aliens' maws.

Babies, then, had been a mistranslation: Preteens would have been more accurate.

Still, everyone was calling the aliens Babyeaters.

The children were sentient at the age they were consumed. The text portions of the corpus were very clear about that. It was part of the great, the noble, the most holy sacrifice. And the children were loved: this was part of the central truth of life, that parents could overcome their love and engage in the terrible winnowing. A parent might spawn a hundred children, and only one in a hundred could survive - for otherwise they would die later, of starvation...

When the Babyeaters had come into their power as a technological species, they could have chosen to modify themselves - to prevent all births but one.

But this they did not choose to do.

For that terrible winnowing was the central truth of life, after all.

<snip>

"In terms of evolutionary psychology... I think I understand what happened. The ancestors of the Babyeaters were a species that gave birth to hundreds of offspring in a spawning season, like Terrestrial fish; what we call r-strategy reproduction. But the ancestral Babyeaters discovered... crystal-tending, a kind of agriculture... long before humans did. They were around as smart as chimpanzees, when they started farming. The adults federated into tribes so they could guard territories and tend crystal. They adapted to pen up their offspring, to keep them around in herds so they could feed them. But they couldn't produce enough crystal for all the children.

"It's a truism in evolutionary biology that group selection can't work among non-relatives. The exception is if there are enforcement mechanisms, punishment for defectors - then there's no individual advantage to cheating, because you get slapped down. That's what happened with the Babyeaters. They didn't restrain their individual reproduction because the more children they put in the tribal pen, the more children of theirs were likely to survive. But the total production of offspring from the tribal pen was greater, if the children were winnowed down, and the survivors got more individual resources and attention afterward. That was how their species began to shift toward a k-strategy, an individual survival strategy. That was the beginning of their culture.

"And anyone who tried to cheat, to hide away a child, or even go easier on their own children during the winnowing - well, the Babyeaters treated the merciful parents the same way that human tribes treat their traitors.

"They developed psychological adaptations for enforcing that, their first great group norm. And those psychological adaptations, those emotions, were reused over the course of their evolution, as the Babyeaters began to adapt to their more complex societies. Honor, friendship, the good of our tribe - the Babyeaters acquired many of the same moral adaptations as humans, but their brains reused the emotional circuitry of infanticide to do it.

"The Babyeater word for good means, literally, to eat children."

[speaker-to-trolls]

Babyeaters

That's really quite unsettling, interesting but still very unsettling.
Incidentally please don't put a race that copies its brain into the next generation into The Solidarity Wars, I'm still working on a species with that premise for there (I'm a slow worker).

Those are some cool ideas about the larval people, so good I may have to steal them.

I've actually had a weird theological worldbuilding idea, this may not be the right place for it since this seems to be for ideas without a home and this would really be the foundations of a home for other things: One of a number of problems I see with the normal idea of God is this: why would an infinitely powerful and benevolent God create creatures that were inferior to Him? Wouldn't that by definition make them subservient to Him, which would be bad since it would curtail their own capacities and opportunities? My thought was basically this, in the beginning God created companions for Himself out of the stuff of His spirit, it didn't end well.
For some reason a large number of near omnipotent beings could not get on with one another, but since they were all more or less equal in power and understanding they couldn't actually destroy each other. They sat on their thrones, staring at each other across infinity with fists clenched and jaws set, but omniscience cancels omniscience, so there was stalemate. The Gods decided that they were all created with too much power, the next generation needed an opportunity to develope mentally along with their powers, thus they created a number of generations of beings decreasing in power, ending up with humans. An idea which came up in connection with this was that the higher beings, the Gods, the lesser gods, angels and whatnot, are by and large not all that smart or reasonable, they are created with vast knowledge, so they don't really have to learn things, or learn how to learn things. The less knowledge one is created with the more legwork one has to do to acquire it, and thus the more experience one gains in how to think.

[Siege]

An issue I see with the concept of a stalemate of omnipotents is that it's a contradictio in terminis. After all if you're prevented from doing something, for any reason, then you're not really omnipotent, are you?

Your theology sort of reminds me of the Greek pantheon with its wide array of gods, half-gods and godlike humans. It's interesting, though I've always preferred less human gods myself. Gods ought to be like forces of nature that make humans feel like puny insects before a hurricane.

[Ford Prefect]

I personally like to think of gods as forces of nature, except like all forces of nature they can be tamed by sheer guts and ingenuity. It's an interesting idea, Speaker, and one that does not need logically silly omniscience or omnipotence to work. However, one wonders why God would create beings that are his equal; it seems plausible to me that as the creator, he might be more inclined to give himself edges in power over his 'children'. Sort of like how Zeus was a step-up from everyone else on Olympus Mons.

[Siege]

Maybe these pseudo-omnipotent gods are like sysadmins hard-coded into the universe. They can dick around all they want, screw causality, time and the rules of logic themselves but they wouldn't be able to affect their peers directly no matter how hard they tried. If that were the case in a way I can see why after a few eons and the exhaustion of all the myriad things you could do as an omnipotent it would be sort of fun to have an actual equal around as a sparring partner. This then leads to the first omnipotent creating a bunch of equals. The universe would be their chess board, and all the lesser gods would be their pawns. After all it wouldn't be much fun to play chess against the opponent's pieces, you need an equal opponent actually controlling the pawns, knights and bishops and so forth.

Of course it would probably really suck for all the other inhabitants of that universe because they could really do nothing but keep their heads down and hope none of the omnipotents take an interest in them, but still. (Although they still wouldn't technically be omnipotent. And if the first omnipotent can hard-code more omnipotents into the framework of the universe that kind of begs the question of why these omnipotents can't reverse the same trick. But that's all beside the point, really.)

[speaker-to-trolls]

However, one wonders why God would create beings that are his equal; it seems plausible to me that as the creator, he might be more inclined to give himself edges in power over his 'children'. Sort of like how Zeus was a step-up from everyone else on Olympus Mons.

Oddly I was assuming benevolence for the created beings on the part of the creator, not something I usually do. I was assuming that He would think it wouldn't be fair to create creatures that were inferior to Him by default since then He'd be setting up the universe as an unchanging heierarchy. Or maybe He just wants someone to talk to on His own terms, rather than all the fannying about with angels and prophets and hallucinations and inevitable sectarian bullshit you have to go through with humans.

[Reservoir]

My crazy idea is as follows:

The modern day word is the setting for a background war between the Haemons(human, light) and the Daemons(demons, dark). However, humanity has some misconceptions about their place in this universe.

In fact, the Daemons are the champions of order. Their chief color, black, is indivisible and unchanging. It cannot be broken into different shades, and is absolute on the color scale. White, however, can be shattered into a spectrum of colors. White light can be bent, distorted, manipulated. Therefore, humanity is, in fact, the agency of chaos.

Before our universe was born, the Light was confined to a great orb within the blackness of The Order. Those few Daemons who watched and maintained her perfect, spherical shape were known as The Crying, for they were agents of order who had to babysit chaos. Unfortunately for The Order, the Crying were low on the Order totem pole, and chaos eventually broke free and bore the universe in the cold black of The Order.

Ever since, through the shadows of space, The Order has been desperately trying to crunch the Chaos back into her ball. Just when all options seemed done, one final solution was born; Daemons are comprised of a double-helix of runes, whereas Haemons are comprised of a double-helix of chemicals. Combine both, and suddenly a child of chaos becomes orderly and controllable. At least, that was the plan.

Enter Hudson Aristole, 24, the daughter of that experiment. She carries a quadruple-helix genetic code; half Daemon, half Haemon, and all pissed of. After living in hiding and on the run for years, she's tired of the bullshit. If the darkness comes to her, then she'll just have to drive them back...until they're all dead. Unfortunately for her, she doesn't realize that dying is a capital sin in The Order, since Daemons aren't supposed to die: not only are the dead sinners, but those who killed the dead are too. And once she kills a minor daemon who only attempted to grab some hair, she's branded a high-priority target for the entire Order.

Essentially, it would be a story of modern fantasy/grunge fantasy. I imagined that Hud would have a sword of some sort to deal with Daemons, and pistols to deal with Haemons under the control of the Order, which has several human allies. Along the way, she gets allies of her own, which ends up causing even more problems.

One man in particular would end up having to get a blood transfusion from her, which in turn infects his DNA with the Genetic Daemon Runes, making him like her. However, he quickly turns hostile, deciding to further Chaos' cause by selectively choosing people to be infected by the GDR, and then using his suave business and military skills to destroy anyone who opposes his idea of a haemon-dominated universe. However, because he is a business man, he sees himself as the pinnacle of haemon-daemon hybridization, training himself and his body to be every bit better than Hud. The closest established character to this guy, in any universe, would have to be Albert Wesker from Resident Evil: hell, I'll go so far to say that he was the inspiration, the father, of this guy.



Honestly? I'd like to do it. Hell, I'm working on OSaS, an unnamed sci-fi collab, and I'm desperately trying to create a character for O1 Comix!, so why not add more to the plate? The only thing is that I have so little time for my other three, that'd I'd only get to Hud and her gang few and far-between times.

[Artemis]

This is meant as more of a standalone story, but it involves a lot of worldbuilding. It's a direct result of me missing Westworlds

The Drive to Bastard’s Green
A no-Bullshit Fantasy Western

ELEMENTS and CHARACTERISTICS

-The story is a cattle drive, without the cattle. It takes the quintessential fantasy plot, that of an epic quest, and fills it with all the grit and grime and blood and sweat of all the best western stories.

-The main character, Bead Colton, is an aging sederi (female rancher, masc. sedere) who’s made the drive to Bastard’s Green three times in her life. Twice it’s almost killed her, and the last time it did kill her pa. Now she’s got to make the drive again, to make enough money for her to live off of in retirement - she’s getting too old to be a sederi anymore, and even if she makes good money at the Green, she’ll probably have to sell the whole seda anyway. Times are just tough like that.

-She hires a team to help her make the drive, made up of fellow sederes and sederi as well as dels (short for citadel, the huge walled cities that dot the landscape, usually used to mean the people who live in this cities). Some have been to Bastard’s Green before, but most haven’t.

-The animals being driven are buckos - huge, flightly, stubborn, stinky things, the size of a rhino with half the brains. Their uses are great enough to warrant keeping such damnable creatures - their meat is plentiful and tasty, they lay eggs in huge batches which are also edible by themselves if unfertilized, their horns are commonly used to make luxury items like tenago (musical instrument, like a piano crossed with a sationary bike) keys and lexos (magic) wands, their skin can be tanned and made into leather, and their shit is a miracle fertilizer. They breed fast, grow up quick, and will eat anything - which can be a good or a bad thing.

-The main riding animals are called nekta, smart, friendly, and useless for just about everything except riding - they are the exact opposite of buckos. They hover just above the ground - some process in their respiratory system fills air sacs during atmosphere processing - and can pass over nearly any kind of terrain with little problem. They navigate by sight, sound, and tasting the air (like pit vipers), and have a natural magnetic sense thanks to magnetite-like metals in their brain. However, if one of their air sacs is punctured, they are essentially goners - they can’t move and will soon die of suffocation. The best and most humane thing to do is to but a bolt through their brain. If this doesn’t happen, though, nekta can live for as long as forty years - that’s an owner’s lifetime if their sedere owner isn’t too healthy or lucky.

Wild nekta are all but extinct, and the species now exist as more than a dozen breeds, the most common being the Colonial Blue and the Stormchaser breeds. Colonial Blues tend to be hardier, longer-lived, and on the whole easier to train, while Stormchasers are more stubborn and hard to handle, but are ultimately smarter than most other breeds, and much faster to boot. Bead, naturally, rides a Stormchaser.

-The hazards of the drive are legion. Just to start with, the path is crawling with the ghosts of sederes who didn’t make it to Bastard’s Green. They can’t do any physical damage themselves, and most aren’t aware enough to do any intentional harm, but they’ll spook (ha) buckos quite easily, and their howling or muttering or whatever can keep drivers awake long into the night.

Torquewinds are very small but extremely destructive cyclonic storms - rarely wider than a few feet, they can actually rip skin from bones. If an earthly tornado is a hammer, Torquewinds are stilettos. They can turn a man into powder, and leave the man next to him with nothing worse than a messy hairstyle. They frequently spin up along the dusty valleys of the drive, and occasionally collide - when this happens, it creates an implosion that actually crushes anything nearby in about a half-mile radius. They make a characteristic rapid thumping sound as they approach.

Bastard’s Green, like most of the Frontier Continent, was once owned by the Icewater Nation, a tribal society that was dispersed all over the continent by the colonial waves. They have since degenerated into mobile raiding parties, surviving off what they can steal or scavenge from frontiersmen, and driving parties are some of the easiest targets to go for. They are well-organized, many of them veterans or avengers of the last colonial war, and are armed with modern bolt weapons. They see the advantages of owning buckos as much as any colonial.

Vast deserts, treacherous mountain ranges, frozen glaciers, and un-fordable rivers are some of the more obvious terrains standing between drivers and Bastard’s Green. There is also the deceptively lush and green Naylor Forest, where more than 95% of the plants are lethally poisonous near-clones of normal fruits, vegetables, and nuts. The strange, magnetically-haunted Black Knuckle Hills play havoc with compass needles and nekta’s ability to navigate, and magnetic swells can grab a man or beast with too much ferrous burdens right off his feet and send him flying, or grind him into the dirt as if dug in by the palm of god. And, of course, there’s danger lurking in the very halfway points set up specifically to be places of safety on the long drive to Bastard’s Green. Someone doesn’t want this year’s herd brought to market...

-We’ve mentioned bolts a few times. They’re the equivalent of firearms in this world, firing shafts of metal rather than bullets, and basically resemble automatic-loading miniature crossbows, without the gears and strings - they are powered by magnetic levitation. Now, how the hell did an Old West society get railguns? Magic, naturally. Geomancy is the most common and easiest kind of magic, and just about everyone on the frontier knows a little, simply from observing Nekta and the horizon lights (aurorae) and have found lots of uses for it, not least of which a cheap, easy-to-maintain hand weapon.

-The currency is called spauldings (they still use $ as shorthand). One spaulding is about equivalent to fifty modern USD. Its worth is backed by jochum (precious metal taking the place of gold) in the treasuries of the Colonial Administration. A spaulding a day is considered fair wages for a day’s hard work on a seda - Bead is offering her drivers two spauldings a day, plus a bonus of ten per hand once they reach Bastard’s Green. She’s expecting to make enough money to pay them all and then retire - buckos are good business, if you can get them where they need to go.

[Ford Prefect]

I like it already. The notion of a fantasy cattle drive is wonderful, though to be honest I have trouble picturing the hover-horses.

[Artemis]

Me too, actually. I need to sit down and have a mad draw-session with them sometime.

[Siege]

I really like it, but then I'm a total Western junkie so that's to be expected. It's exactly the right mix of weird and familiar to work just right. And for some reason the flying horses strike me as more serpentine than, you know, horselike. Can they only hover just above the earth or can they actually make some altitude?

Also and mandatory: A challenger appears!

[Artemis]

I was sorta thinking something like a jellyfish for some insane reason, but the more I think about it, the more I like a serpentine or draconic kind of design. And they just hover at about the height of a horse's shoulder, I think - they don't really fly, but they'll make it over deep water, as long as its dense enough to push against.