CWBP 2 : Determining the genre and era

[gspRooster]

I fully expect that everybody will bring something of their own perspective to this project no matter what direction it goes in. This, being the kind of collaborative work that it is, is going to run into decision making issues one way or another simply because it's asking for collective buy-in to a single idea, and that's generally pretty difficult to achieve no matter what the task is.

It is certainly possible to go with a number of options.
1 - Go generic, keep many people decently happy by playing to the normalcy of the setting, but you might disappoint people looking for something more unique and new.
2 - Pick a setting, have a vote, risk alienating a few people in favor of the popular opinion.
3 - Attempt some form of compromise. Pick a setting through popular vote, then deliberately apply a "reasonable and conceivable degree of ambiguity", and let everybody run with it. This method could help focus the project in one direction, without applying too strictly limiting factors on individual creativity.

For example...
A theme like "The Guilt That Haunts Me" actually plays in a positive way to that inherent problem of decision making by introducing a simple, core component. "This is a mid-fantasy setting in which moral and immoral actions have a tangible effect on the social and physical aspects of this fictional world through the manipulation of otherworldly beings." Boom, there's your unbreakable rule. The setting for each contributor has to stay in those basic guidelines, but the rest of the creative process can be left up to them. Much in the same way natural phenomena in the real world was described in different ways by different cultures prior to science deciding to show up and prove that Neptune does not in fact rule the waves and there are no sea dragons causing earthquakes because you didn't sacrifice fifteen sheep on the appropriate day in the appropriate way, etc.

One person may say it's caused by the way a soul's aura interacts with a naturally occurring catalyst prevalent in their region - we'll say, for the sake of argument, magically attuned crystal formations, and the spirits are selfishly growing on the power of soul's magical interaction with the crystals, somehow syphoning off their power.
Someone else may say "nope" to the crystals and decide people have a psychic link to an otherworldly dimension that pulls hungry spirits through to our world when a sufficiently enticing action makes them aware of the psychic link.
And yet another person may decide to go a strictly religious route and define the phenomena in a pure battle of good vs evil manner where our every moral decision increases the power of the beings on either side of that struggle.

That sort of avoids the whole "puzzle" issue. You have a unifying world phenomena, but with a totally reasonable degree of ambiguity that is very easy to play off as the differing explanations of various cultural perceptions that ultimately lets people still be highly creative without breaking the basic premise.

Then again, maybe nobody wants to do any of this, maybe everybody was happy with generic? lol.
I'm just one voice.

[Jalyha]

No, no, I get that...

I guess, probably because I just went through this whole long thing about populations, I was really thinking about what the addition of a life form that comes into being based on the social/moral obligations of another life form would have on the population AND on the geography.

You'd then need people to agree (or get a majority to agree, because it's a cooperative project) on all the little things an individual mapper could simply decide for themselves.

Examples:

1) do the ghosts/demons/spirits have physical bodies?

If so:

1a) do they use resources? Build homes? have their own villages/dens/whatever? Those would need to be mapped, yes?
1b) Do they eat? Drink? Regular food? You'd need more farms in the areas where they congregate, regardless of who is mapping that area

If not:

1c) Can other people see your demon, or only you? If you alone, would anyone really talk about it enough to create theories on the concept, in a medieval time period? People tended to push things like that into the water closet...? If other people could see them, they must be made of something? Does that chemical or substance affect the air? The atmosphere? Those changes could affect temperature, growth of plant life, anything!

1d) If they have a physical presence (or if other people could see them, cause who wants to walk through an evil spirit?) how would that affect the amount of *space* available/needed per capita for your cities/towns?

1e) If it DOES affect your population, people would obvs try to stop committing any major deeds "good or bad" to control it, yes? So people would be less likely to do *anything* extreme. That includes exploration, founding new cities, creation of weapons, tools, machines... what counts as a major deed anyway? If no one ever does anything extraordinary, then mundane accomplishments/mistakes become great... do these call demons/spirits as well?

All of these things affect your *people* who, in turn, affect the *land*.

I have tons more question/examples, but I don't think it matters at the moment. My point was simply that first, if you go too far beyond "generic", you have to get the majority to agree on how much of this information is necessary, and then you have to get them to agree, seperately, on each relevant point.

And in the growth/development of an entire world, pretty much everything is relevant.

Now, that's fine if that's what everyone wants to do... but each and every one of those decisions takes time, and discussion, and polls.

I think the reason so many people are bent on what you called "generic" is because they'd prefer to get things decided, and start mapping.


Then again, that's all my opinion, and as you said, I'm just one voice.