General Discussion

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

9 minutes ago, Arraenae said:

Heh... a lot of the time I don't even write enough to get to a big important scene. I have a lot of half-thought out ideas for large projects, but most of the time my motivation fizzles out by the end of the first few chapters. I usually end up sticking to smaller projects and jumping around a lot.

That's been the case for me for a while. I've finished a couple of fanfics, but this is the first piece of original fiction I've gotten this far on—I'm up to over 55K, which is about 54K more than I usually manage.  But now I'm at the big important scene—the one that compelled me to write this story in the first place—and I find myself stalling before I buckle down and write. I've still managed to hit my quota every day since I started, but still. 

[Truthweaver she/her]

1 hour ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

Argh…has anyone else ever gotten to a big important scene they'd planned for a while, and then procrastinated the storms out of writing it? 

*Raises hand* I'm always afraid the scene will never be as awesome as I planned out. But I just go ahead and write it anyway and tell myself that I'll change it once I actually get it written. I find it's a lot easier to go back and fix a scene once it's actually out of my head, even if it's not as amazing as I imagined, heheh.

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

12 minutes ago, Truthweaver said:

*Raises hand* I'm always afraid the scene will never be as awesome as I planned out. But I just go ahead and write it anyway and tell myself that I'll change it once I actually get it written. I find it's a lot easier to go back and fix a scene once it's actually out of my head, even if it's not as amazing as I imagined, heheh.

At least I'm not alone.  

And that's my current strategy—write it out and fix it later. It's still….well, like you said, I'm afraid it won't be as good on the page as it is in my head. 

[Truthweaver she/her]

I know, that's the frustrating part. In my head: "Wow, this scene is amazing! Conflict, suspense, everything! I can't wait to write it!"

Writing it: "No...no, it was supposed to be better than this! Why isn't it awesome? Why...???" *Lays head down on desk in defeat*

But yeah, I tell myself that as long as I can just have something on the page to work with, I'll be able to tweak it to match my imaginings. Oddly, it sometimes helps to set yourself low expectations.  

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

3 minutes ago, Truthweaver said:

I know, that's the frustrating part. In my head: "Wow, this scene is amazing! Conflict, suspense, everything! I can't wait to write it!"

Writing it: "No...no, it was supposed to be better than this! Why isn't it awesome? Why...???" *Lays head down on desk in defeat*

But yeah, I tell myself that as long as I can just have something on the page to work with, I'll be able to tweak it to match my imaginings. Oddly, it sometimes helps to set yourself low expectations.  

Wouldn't it be easier if you could just record a scene directly from your brain?  

Low expectations. Great. I'll make "Will be written in words that are often used by humans" my sole criteria. You're a lifesaver.  

[Truthweaver she/her]

30 minutes ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

Low expectations. Great. I'll make "Will be written in words that are often used by humans" my sole criteria. You're a lifesaver.  

No problem. Don't forget those little quote thingies sometimes, for dialogue. And maybe add some paragraphs if you're feeling particularly adventurous. People like those, too.

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

17 minutes ago, Truthweaver said:

No problem. Don't forget those little quote thingies sometimes, for dialogue. And maybe add some paragraphs if you're feeling particularly adventurous. People like those, too.

Fun fact: In one college English course I took, I had to read a book that had no quotation marks, didn't add paragraph breaks when a new character spoke, and barely had paragraph breaks at all. So I guess the moral of that story is that I should add quotation marks and paragraphs….unless I want to write Seerius Literachur.  

[Truthweaver she/her]

23 minutes ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

Fun fact: In one college English course I took, I had to read a book that had no quotation marks, didn't add paragraph breaks when a new character spoke, and barely had paragraph breaks at all. So I guess the moral of that story is that I should add quotation marks and paragraphs….unless I want to write Seerius Literachur.  

Seerius Literachur is the only literature. Never-ending blocks of text, confusing dialogue, and strange punctuation is a must. Making readers work to actually understand your story gives them a sense of accomplishment. And probably a headache. 

[Kobold King he/him]

It's finally occurred to me that the reason my original sci-fi setting continues to elude my attempts at defining it is because I've been trying to write Lovecraftian cosmic horror with the upbeat optimism of 1950s pulp space opera.

I need to focus myself on making it one or the other... or else fully commit myself to blending the the two with a few less seams.

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

21 minutes ago, Kobold King said:

It's finally occurred to me that the reason my original sci-fi setting continues to elude my attempts at defining it is because I've been trying to write Lovecraftian cosmic horror with the upbeat optimism of 1950s pulp space opera.

I need to focus myself on making it one or the other... or else fully commit myself to blending the the two with a few less seams.

Do you listen to Welcome to Night Vale, by chance? Their blend is more Lovecraftian cosmic horror and absurdist philosophy, but it might be worth looking into. Besides, it's super funny and weird and will probably give you feels.  

[Kobold King he/him]

10 hours ago, TwiLyghtSansSparkles said:

Do you listen to Welcome to Night Vale, by chance? Their blend is more Lovecraftian cosmic horror and absurdist philosophy, but it might be worth looking into. Besides, it's super funny and weird and will probably give you feels.  

 

I keep seeing that name pop up, but no, I haven't heard it. Where do I have to go to do so? Is there a website?

[TwiLyghtSansSparkles she/her]

3 minutes ago, Kobold King said:

 

I keep seeing that name pop up, but no, I haven't heard it. Where do I have to go to do so? Is there a website?

Here is where you can listen. I just use my phone, but there's a couple different ways you can do it. 

[Brightlord M. Alhstrom he/him]

On 4/5/2017 at 7:20 PM, StrikerEZ said:

The first one is called MindJumping. A person who uses it is called a Hivemind. When a Hivemind touches another person (skin-to-skin contact is required), their mind is transferred to the other person. Their original body still has a part of their mind in it and can function by itself, however. Once in a host, they can either hide inside the person's mind, reading their thoughts and looking into their memories, or they can completely take the host over. They can then MindJump into another body, leaving another fragment of their mind in their first host. However, this leaves them vulnerable; there's an invisible link that connects them all the way back to their original body. If any of the bodies along a link are killed (when the body that the Hivemind is currently in is killed, the Hivemind is just returned back to their last host), the original body of the Hivemind would die, stranding the Hivemind in their most recent host. They do not die and can still travel between bodies, but they no longer leave a link behind. There is no quick escape if their current host is killed (this has its advantages and disadvantages).

Crazy, but this sounds a LOT like the main idea behind my main villain in my current Artifice Wars WIP novel (Artifice Wars being my current Multiverse). She has lived for 700 years by moving her mind from one body to another. Shifting minds kills the previous body, and she has to fight the new host for control, but it allows her to go from an old body to a young one. It's a lot more restrictive, in that you can only inhabit a single mind, that the transfer takes a lot of Soulfire (my magical energy/currency), and that the host can fight back. She typically chooses people with weak wills, and then weakens the will even more through addiction and other means.

[StrikerEZ he/him]

39 minutes ago, Lord Maelstrom said:

Crazy, but this sounds a LOT like the main idea behind my main villain in my current Artifice Wars WIP novel (Artifice Wars being my current Multiverse). She has lived for 700 years by moving her mind from one body to another. Shifting minds kills the previous body, and she has to fight the new host for control, but it allows her to go from an old body to a young one. It's a lot more restrictive, in that you can only inhabit a single mind, that the transfer takes a lot of Soulfire (my magical energy/currency), and that the host can fight back. She typically chooses people with weak wills, and then weakens the will even more through addiction and other means.

That's actually pretty cool. It's crazy how two people can come up without crazily similar ideas independently of each other.

Kind of like how I came up with the idea of doing a technologically advanced fantasy world before I'd ever heard about Brandon Sanderson. 

[Brightlord M. Alhstrom he/him]

3 minutes ago, StrikerEZ said:

That's actually pretty cool. It's crazy how two people can come up without crazily similar ideas independently of each other.

Kind of like how I came up with the idea of doing a technologically advanced fantasy world before I'd ever heard about Brandon Sanderson. 

Now that's just crazy. Artifice Wars is exactly like that. Except that the first couple stories/series will be during this world's "renaissance" and "industrial" era. Maybe even get into the information age after a while. It's why I'm using Artifice as it's core: It means that since the magic is centered on research and magic-powered-machines, technology becomes viable again in a fantasy setting.

[StrikerEZ he/him]

1 hour ago, Lord Maelstrom said:

Now that's just crazy. Artifice Wars is exactly like that. Except that the first couple stories/series will be during this world's "renaissance" and "industrial" era. Maybe even get into the information age after a while. It's why I'm using Artifice as it's core: It means that since the magic is centered on research and magic-powered-machines, technology becomes viable again in a fantasy setting.

Dang, those are a lot of coincidences. Of course, I think that's where the similarities between our ideas end. 

Of course, Brandon totally stole my idea for several different worlds being connected.

/sarcasm

[Lindel he/him]

My most recent project is something I'm calling Neurospace. Basically, it's a shared mental world, a sort of collective unconscious, that's created by people's concepts and beliefs about the world around them. Thoughtforms are "objects" in Neurospace that reflect specific concepts. Facets are layers of related thoughtforms within Neurospace. Up until a recent point in human history, which I've set as 2018, (yes, I'm totally embracing the Twenty Minutes Into the Future trope), Neurospace existed entirely unknown to humankind. A few people had at times inadvertently tapped into it through the use of psychedelic drugs, but until March 9th, 2018, such incidents had never received massive public attention. On March 9th, a group of college students in Washington, mixing LSD and marijuana, fell unconscious and shared the exact same dream. The dream had the same odd features, the same events, and the students were able to provide consistent details completely independently. They also claimed that through their conversations in the dream, they had learned things about each other that they apparently had no other way of knowing. If that was true, then it would mean their minds had literally interacted directly in a way that had never before been thought possible. Governments and independent groups around the world began working to try to replicate the results. By the end of the year, several groups had claimed to have replicated the event under experimental conditions, however, mixtures of existing psychedelic drugs were inconsistent and had undesirable side effects. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology began creating a new drug which would minimize the side effects and which they hoped would consistently tap into the "collective unconscious". Eventually, they found a formula. They named their new drug Sickle. As the secret for refining Sickle leaked out, access to Neurospace became widespread. Governments began to try to regulate the use in response to serious security threats posed by a drug that lets a person see inside other people's heads, but they came into the scene too late. An unstable period of mental terrorism and espionage ensued, leading to massive conflicts between world powers, many of which took place entirely in Neurospace. Then, as people slowly began to develop a unique concept of Neurospace itself, as a separate entity from the physical world, facets in Neurospace began to manifest in response to these concepts. Regions of Neurospace became dissociated with the physical world, twisting and warping into Anomalies, completely cut off from the world that spawned it. The Anomalies took shape based on people's concepts of other realities and parallel worlds, trapping the minds of those who had inadvertently created them. By 2027, two thirds of the population had become trapped in the Anomalies, and civilization as we know it had collapsed. Most of these "Dreamers", unable to feed themselves, simply died. A handful were kept alive by groups that hoped that they might be able to discover more about the Anomalies and prevent them from spreading. But anyone who entered an Anomaly became trapped there, making it impossible to determine much about their nature.

That's the basic summary of the setting. I'm planning to use this for a roleplaying campaign with my D&D group, but I have a problem. I need more specific rules about how exactly Neurospace works. As in, what it actually looks like, how it works, what you can and can't do there, etc. Any thoughts? Sorry if this is a bit scattered, the concept is rather half-baked at the moment. 

Edited May 18, 2017 by Lindel
clarification

[Arraenae]

2 hours ago, Lindel said:

The Anomalies took shape based on people's concepts of other realities and parallel worlds, trapping the minds of those who had inadvertently created them.

I guess most of us fantasy and sci-fi readers are doomed, then.

What physically happens to someone whose mind is trapped in an Anomaly?

[Lindel he/him]

2 hours ago, Arraenae said:

I guess most of us fantasy and sci-fi readers are doomed, then.

What physically happens to someone whose mind is trapped in an Anomaly?

Haha, pretty much. Physically, they end up in a coma, basically. Actually, more like a vegetative state, no sign of any awareness. An fMRI would mainly only pick up activity in the brain stem. Their consciousness, independent of their physical brain, becomes completely detached from the physical world, so all their higher thinking ceases to have any direct connection to their original brain. They pretty much just exist in the Anomaly. At least, that's how I'm currently thinking of it. But in-world, most people would only have theories and guesses, not the actual explanation. 

Edited May 18, 2017 by Lindel

[Arraenae]

@Lindel, what actually happens in the Anomalies?

[Lindel he/him]

Okay, here's where it might get a little strange. This is all built to work as a shared cosmology for my past roleplaying campaigns, which have had various tie-ins and references from one to the next. It's evolved over time, but what I'm settling on now is that the connection, despite each campaign seeming to take place in entirely different worlds, is that each of those worlds is an Anomaly in Neurospace. So, basically, the Anomalies are fantastical worlds based on the imaginations of the individuals, and can take many different forms. Each Anomaly works as a world in which I can have a fair amount of worldbuilding freedom. Also, time doesn't work the same way within the Anomalies, just like time in dreams doesn't always correlate to time in real life. For example, one Anomaly centers around an earth-based space-faring civilization that has hundreds of years of additional history, even though in the real world it's only existed for thirty years. In that Anomaly, they've also started to discover their own version of Neurospace, which gets rather complicated. Another is a high-fantasy world of gods and demons that's been around for thousands of years of its own time, based loosely on the D&D 4e cosmology. Another one is based on a Magic: the Gathering fan's ideas about the plane of Zendikar. The continuity comes in the form of these strange, alien parasites, unnamed as far as my players are concerned, which I'm calling Metaforms. Basically, these metaphysical parasites exist somewhere out there in the universe. They feed on the consciousness of other beings, and the Anomalies have created weak spots that they can exploit. A particularly aggressive Metaform known as Onyx completely consumed the first Anomaly he first entered, and by the end of a recent campaign, it had all but destroyed "Eovale", the high-fantasy D&D world. The problem is, the players have little to no idea about any of this behind the scenes stuff so far.  They just know that there have been a lot of loose ends.        

[Darkness Ascendant he/him]

Hoooolyyy crem @Lindel That redifines trippiness...

12 hours ago, Lindel said:

In that Anomaly, they've also started to discover their own version of Neurospace

damnation you should really watch Rick and Morty, there is an episode on pocket universes in pocket universes in pocket universes ha XD

So, can two people share the same Anomaly? As in, two people fall into one and form the universe based on both their thoughts, each mind perhaps fighting over the Anomaly?

[Lindel he/him]

12 hours ago, Darkness Ascendant said:

Hoooolyyy crem @Lindel That redifines trippiness...

damnation you should really watch Rick and Morty, there is an episode on pocket universes in pocket universes in pocket universes ha XD

So, can two people share the same Anomaly? As in, two people fall into one and form the universe based on both their thoughts, each mind perhaps fighting over the Anomaly?

Haha, yeah. And of course, that brings up the question, if entire worlds can be created inside people's heads, why assume that the "real" world isn't just in someone's head? I'm actually playing with the idea of eventually implying that every world we've played in, including the "real" world, might really just exists inside my head as the DM and in the heads of the players. So, maybe our real life selves are literally creating those worlds by imagining them. And if a character somehow became aware of that... That's what I call trippy. 

Yeah, the high-fantasy D&D world was actually shared by three Dreamers originally, who took the role of the original gods of the universe, but two of them are kinda dead now, and the one survivor has been completely consumed by the metaform Onyx, and has become its primary host. I'm actually still trying to decide if each individual Dreamer normally forms their own Anomaly, or if each Anomaly is formed from a collection of minds, with one or a couple that are at its core. If each person forms their own separate Anomaly, that's a whole bunch of worlds that were formed just to die within a few weeks of real time. Unless the Anomaly continues to exist independent of its creator, in which case there are billions of mental universes "out there" that have no ties left to our world. I suppose every Anomaly wouldn't necessarily have to be a fully fleshed out universe either, some might only encompass a planet, a country, or even a small town. Hmm...

Edited May 19, 2017 by Lindel

[Arraenae]

3 hours ago, Lindel said:

Haha, yeah. And of course, that brings up the question, if entire worlds can be created inside people's heads, why assume that the "real" world isn't just in someone's head? I'm actually playing with the idea of eventually implying that every world we've played in, including the "real" world, might really just exists inside my head as the DM and in the heads of the players. So, maybe our real life selves are literally creating those worlds by imagining them. And if a character somehow became aware of that... That's what I call trippy. 

Yeah, the high-fantasy D&D world was actually shared by three Dreamers originally, who took the role of the original gods of the universe, but two of them are kinda dead now, and the one survivor has been completely consumed by the metaform Onyx, and has become its primary host. I'm actually still trying to decide if each individual Dreamer normally forms their own Anomaly, or if each Anomaly is formed from a collection of minds, with one or a couple that are at its core. If each person forms their own separate Anomaly, that's a whole bunch of worlds that were formed just to die within a few weeks of real time. Unless the Anomaly continues to exist independent of its creator, in which case there are billions of mental universes "out there" that have no ties left to our world. I suppose every Anomaly wouldn't necessarily have to be a fully fleshed out universe either, some might only encompass a planet, a country, or even a small town. Hmm...

How do the people in the Anomalies come to exist? Are they created by the mind of the Dreamer? Can the Dreamer dictate or control what's in the Anomaly they made?

[Lindel he/him]

3 hours ago, Arraenae said:

How do the people in the Anomalies come to exist? Are they created by the mind of the Dreamer? Can the Dreamer dictate or control what's in the Anomaly they made?

They are created by the mind of the Dreamer. They are self-aware. For all intents and purposes, they are "real" people, and getting any further into the question about the nature of their existence and whether they have "souls" is something that can't be explained even by the "science" of their world. I have my own theories, but I'm choosing to leave that as an open, unanswerable question. Typically, the Dreamer doesn't directly control the shaping it of the world, it takes shape based on their mind, but they don't actively, consciously create anything. In many cases, the Dreamers themselves aren't fully aware of their role in the world that's been created around them. In Stratvale, the space faring sci-fi Anomaly, the Dreamer is reincarnated throughout the history of his world, but he basically becomes a new person each time, without any memory of his past lives. In the high-fantasy D&D Anomaly, Eovale, the three Dreamers became the original gods, called the Old Ones. They originally held onto some of their past memories, and they actively shaped the world within the bounds that was set at its inception. Their active role in the Anomaly is part of what made it especially vulnerable to metaforms. As millennia passed within Eovale, the Dreamers started to forget where they had come from and what they had once been. In comparison to eons as omniscient gods, their previous lives as mortals faded. In my current campaign, taking place in the Anomaly I'm calling Duskvale, the Dreamer is schizophrenic, and has become infected by two metaforms, Dusk and Onyx, which are at war inside his mind. He's aware that the world seems to revolve around him, but doesn't really understand why. So, to answer your question, it really just depends. Each Anomaly is fairly unique in most aspects, with certain connections and shared rules.

Edited May 20, 2017 by Lindel