Brainstorming!

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Shady
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Brainstorming!

Post by Shady »

This thread will serve as a repository of ideas for the world Siege and I are working on. A sort of testing ground, where ideas can be expanded upon and elaborated further, good ones used, bad ones discarded. This will be a long term project that will I hope produce great results, awesome stories and an interesting world.
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Re: Brainstorming!

Post by Siege »

I'm proposing we stick with an about Congo-sized area for Vlasenica, so about 2,3 million km2. With an ocean or at least a sea of some kind to one side, this size means we can stick pretty much any type of terrain we want in there. It's also large enough to fit a load of cities, territories, ethniticities, areas of influence and so on without immediately seeming crowded as well.
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Re: Brainstorming!

Post by Shady »

Works for me. Although we should probably elaborate on the neighboring countries, at least those closest to Vlasenica. It is after all just a part of a much larger world. For a start maybe just some basic information, we can expand upon it later, when it becomes necessary.

The following is a quote of Some brainstorming from fb chat:

It might be a neat idea to set this in a Cold War type setting, with two major competing power blocks trying to win over Vlasenica as their puppet-state.

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I think this'll be a slow-but-steady project. It's supposed to be fairly realistic, so we can't take the LAZOR ROBOTS!!!11! route.

We take the more serious route

Plus I'd like for even the most evil hardassed warlord (who feeds his opponents to sharks) to have a plausible motivation and some humanity to him, even if it's just that he likes his dogs a lot.

My thoughts exactly, we have the characters be human, not cliches on legs.

Exactly. I think evil bastards become even more vile and despicable and generally horrible if they're, beside all the atrocities they commit, also dedicated family-men who like their kids a lot and so on.
Because it makes them more human.
It's easy to hate somebody who's got nothing in common with you, but preferably we'd introduce these guys as seemingly fairly reasonable and likeable chaps... And then you find out they feed their enemies to sharks and generally carve valleys of blood through the land. And the reader goes "oh, shit, I was rooting for this guy".


That will make the story itself so much better.

Yeah. I'd very dearly love for there to be a kind of ambiguity, where sometimes the bad guys are more likeable than the good guys.

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I think this setting is ideal for illustration that sometimes, people do all the wrong things for the right reasons, or all the right things for the wrong reasons, and it may still work out right, or wrong, depending on the circumstances. Hell, who's to say what's right or wrong?
The warlord may be just as right in his convictions as the president.

Indeed.
Nothing is black and white...

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Should probably begin with some sort of definition of the country, its size, its immediate neighbors, things like that.

Yes! A description of some key players, cities, the major players and stuff like that. Perhaps even a short description of the surrounding countries. The Great powers, etc.

Exactly. Give people a feel for the world.
Maybe stick with Congo-size for the country itself, so 2,345,409 km2. That should be plenty to feature everything we want to feature and more.

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Maybe start with, like, the distribution of power right at the time of the assassination of the god-president.
So you'd have his cronies in control of the state apparatus, but a bunch of warlords on the fringes, and Kežman would have a lot of mercenaries loyal to her own corporation under her own command, etc.
Or maybe not warlords but rebels. The warlords are generals of the Radojević regime and they only pop up after he's killed.

I like that, especially the second part.

Let's say capital is on the seaboard, which is in the west of the country. So Radojević and his traditional powerbase are located there, and the rebels are located in the north, east and/or south of the country.
We'd still need a motivation for the rebels though. Do they belong to different ethniticities, religions, are they dissatisfied with the regime's policies, or a combination of those?
I'm also wondering if we should use actually existing military hardware or invent our own analogues.

A combination would work best I think, as a motivation. Several reasons, such as ethnic hate, religions, etc.
I don't know, one is simpler, the other could be far more interesting...

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As an aside if the motivations are complex, including ethnic and religious tensions, the rebels might be as much at war with each other as they are with the central government, adding another layer of complexity.
They may have formed a coalition against the regime now, but as soon as the regime falls they'll be at each other's throats.

Yes, I like that. The turning point being the death of El Presidente.
Shouldn't we be posting this in the thread?

You do the honours

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You know, I really like the idea of just focusing on one (relatively) small country, instead of on some HUGE star empire, and making it far more complex and engaging than some of the galactic settings we have.
Not that there's anything wrong with a galactic setting but it just proves that it's all a matter of details, and scale just doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
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