A Realm Without Fire

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Rogissidor
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A Realm Without Fire

Post by Rogissidor »

A long time ago I made an OHR game but I drifted away from the whole game dev thing for a while. I got the itch again and I've been writing notes on a game concept for the last month or so. I'd really like some feedback/motivation if anyone has the time to read this, it's getting hard to keep it all inside my head.

It's a fantasy setting, but I want to avoid the usual magic and monarchies. The highest technology would be punch card computers. Fire isn't physically possible. There's heat and light but no combustion. Lamps and steam engines work chemically. Humans and kitsune (not furries) live in a Planet of the Apes sort of arrangement where humans are savage outcasts. The hero's giant sword has a hammered dulcimer built into the blade edge.

There's a cooking system, a card game, and the characters' abilities are musical rather than magical. I don't think I'm going with an overworld map but you'll get a means of fast travel between cities in the way FFXI handled airships. I'm still trying to get it all on paper before I start working on maps and graphics to make a demo.

Forgive me if this is a bit rough, but here's the story sample. I wrote this 5 years ago and started revising it when I started writing a game outline from it.

One
Rogi's caravan stopped. Only a few miles to reach Cithgaer and the animals were being stubborn again. As the cart's motion halted and the wind no longer in his face, his rough locks of hair flew forward over his face. "You infernal lizards," he mumbled as he ran his claws back over his scalp and proceeded to slide off the wagon. Distracted, watching the yoked beasts, his tail inadvertently scraped against the side of the wagon. “Shi-it, crap,” he said softly as he clumsily landed and turned about to find a crimson streak where his tail had struck the splintery wood.
He had been reading at the reigns again. The tundra path was straight enough that even the dumbest pack lizard could follow it blind. Biologists say they’re probably blind and just feel their way around. Something must be blocking the path, or one of the moronic creatures had tripped over its own feet. Better still, one (or both!) had died of who cares what and would make a decent meal for the distracted merchant. Instead, nothing was wrong. As Rogi stepped forward expecting to find something, he only found his healthy, not-for-dinner pack lizards in their usual stupor. They were rented anyway and the stable master would chew him out and charge him this time, no more warnings. Their dull turquoise scales glinted in the afternoon moonglow as the one on the right let out a nonchalant “gribaah.”
Rogi sighed in hungry dismay. He opened his mouth to scold the beasts but caught himself, realizing the futility of it. Instead, all he could do was rub their necks and pat them a few times, hoping for the best as he turned around to climb back onto the wagon. “Gribaba baaah,” one uttered as he ran his claws across its scales. Picking his book up from the ground, he dusted it off and took his seat at the reigns to find a camping spot for the night. Moonpass was within the hour. As he poured a pale green flask of algicite to fill the headlamp, he remembered that his tail was bleeding. A pop, a hiss of steam, and the filament began to glow.
***
Rogissidor Thamalia was the seventh son of the seventh house of Thamalia. At the age of fifteen, he had been betrothed to the third daughter of the sixth house and pushed into an apprenticeship in the senate. His absence seemed to interest the scribes and journalists more than his immediate family. Some speculated that he left for that very reason.
***
The pack lizards stood unyoked in the clearing as Rogi set up camp for the night. The animals lacked the intelligence to realize it, but they were exhausted from going two nights straight without stopping. In two more, he would reach Cithgaer. The major moon had disappeared behind the hills of the western horizon and the minor moon had taken its place in opposing orbit. Stars were almost visible in the cracks of the steel-gray clouded sky. He stood up and unhooked the headlamp from the front of wagon.
Crates of dried vegetables and coffees filled the back of the wagon. The dry goods would be sold to market vendors in the city. The coffee was already sold to a cafe in Cithgaer’s lower district. It had been a few months since he’d been in town to relax at his favorite corner table there. He was looking forward to a tangerine ale.
In the clearing, Rogi’s rice cooker bubbled over onto the heating pad. A few white grains fell into the cooking fluid and quickly blackened near the heating rods. After setting the cooker onto a crate and having filled several yellow-green peppers with the sticky grains, Rogi stepped up to the seat at the head of the wagon. As his stuffed peppers gave off steam in the cool evening air, he looked toward the clearing where his lizards were standing. They were nearly motionless, and would be silent as well if not for a sporadic “grib grib gribaaah” as one of them would exhaust its short-term memory capacity and suddenly be reminded of its own existence. Or at least, that was how he surmised that their minds functioned.
His mind wandered as he ate. He didn’t have plans after reaching Cithgaer. No trade jobs lined up, no labor contracts. If he had stayed, he would have been giving opening speeches at government functions and preparing reports on the price of textiles. His family was the ruling house and the only real threat to his their stable life was political tension with the sixth house. He remembered that today would have been his wedding day.
No one was around. In the cold silence, he picked up his sword and tuned its dulcimer strings as he walked to the edge of the path. An opulent betrothal gift; his family’s crest reflected off the blade face in the moonlight, while opposite that of her family inlaid in wood beneath the strings. He could see the city in the distance and knew home was far behind him. As he began hitting the notes, he knew that Thamalia was not home.
***
A REALM WITHOUT FIRE
***
Two
The light dimmed on the page before him. His lantern had run out. The cafe was quiet, but not empty. He looked about and noticed the waitress at the far end of the bar, speaking cheerfully with one of the patrons and the bartender. Her gaze met his, her silent nod communicating that she would be over momentarily. While she finished her conversation, Rogi took notice of the other patrons at the tables. An older couple seemed to barely acknowledge each other, but both were focused on a Thalasian language tome between them. A young man sitting alone was nervously scrawling a letter. A girl with green hair was fidgeting with the lantern on her table. The guitarist standing on the stage filled the air with an indifferent melody as he gazed blankly into space.
After filling Rogi's glass, the waitress cordially poured the flask from her left hand into the table lantern. An orange glow once again enveloped the dark corner as fresh algicite eagerly consumed the metal rod in the lantern's reservoir. The algae cells silently exploded as points of light, their fatal expression of ecstasy. Rogi returned his eyes to his book, now illuminated by the death of microorganisms.
Across the room, a man in a hooded gray coat was sipping a drink from a tall glass. Rogi caught the man in gray glancing in his direction. As immediately as he noticed, Rogi jerked his eyes away. The man was watching him. Rogi tried to read the next poem in his now-visible book, but something about the man's features suddenly caused him great discomfort. His ears, though obscured by the hood, were flat against his head. He was sure of it, this silent observer was a human.
Last edited by Rogissidor on Tue May 02, 2017 1:26 am, edited 1 time in total.
TMC
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Re: A Realm Without Fire

Post by TMC »

Ah, this is a really interesting setting and story. And you write very well; I enjoyed reading it.

So, I guess this isn't the game concept that you previously worked on (did you ever release anything?), but was just a story five years ago?
I'm kind of surprised that you want to make a game out of it instead of a novel, since it's well written, but it's hard to translate good writing into a game because of everything else you have to do too. Nonetheless, whatever you decide, I'd like to see more!
Rogissidor wrote:The hero's giant sword has a hammered dulcimer built into the blade edge.
Haha! But I guess you mean blade, not blade edge.

Minor comments on the flow of the story:
Their dull turquoise scales glinted in the afternoon moonglow...
Moonpass was within the hour. As he poured a pale green flask of algicite to fill the headlamp...
It seemed contradictory that it's the equivalent of afternoon but it's already necessary to turn on a lamp. I guess it's actually pretty late. But of course, days might be far less than 24 hours long.
His absence seemed to interest the scribes and journalists more than his immediate family. Some speculated that he left for that very reason.
I found this quite ambiguous, which really broke the flow while reading it.
Only a few miles to reach Cithgaer ... In two more [nights], he would reach Cithgaer.
Again, seems contradictory, at least by my understanding of "a few", unless these lizards are incredibly slow.
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Rogissidor
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Post by Rogissidor »

Writing fiction is nice but I like the technical and artistic aspects of game design. I don't have any published games but I've worked on some demos over the years. They were usually too technical and not really story driven so that's what I'm challenging myself with here.

I didn't proofread it until now so some of the logic and details might be off. This helps a lot to sort it out.

Afternoon might not be the best word to use there but the two moons do create a traditional sense of night and day. Without fire, there can't be any stars or molten core in the earth. Algicite grows underground and lunar tides push it up into the rocks. It reacts with metal ore and heats the planet geothermally. The larger moon might be made of glass so it reflects the light in the oceans as it orbits. The lesser moon mostly just reflects the other. They're in opposing orbits, hence day and night.

Fantasy stories usually leave out white collar workers and information societies. Everyone's a farmer or a shop owner or a tradesman. Rogi is born into a political family and all he has to do is go with the flow, marry into a rival house for political reasons, and have a guaranteed upper middle class life. The media and the people cared more than his family when he left because it made good tabloids for a week. His situation is also influenced by a book about the history of industrial music, "Assimilate" by Alex Reed. There's a segment analyzing the demographic appeal of industrial music and it's mostly middle class white males, with the appeal being that the sound is the antithesis of the cultural expectation of "grow up, get a job, get married..."
TMC
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Post by TMC »

Yes, wearing many hats is also interesting.

Oh, so when you say fire isn't possible, you don't mean just on that planet, but the whole universe, and you're excluding a lot of things unrelated to fire, like nuclear fusion... (This reaction with metal ore doesn't sound sustainable!)
But I don't think this is hard sci-fi, so I don't care too much about it being perfectly logical; I would just treat it as a sort of gimmick to create a unique setting, unless the story insists on focusing heavily on the "science".

It did seem a bit odd that in this fantasy setting in a different universe there were still mundane things like rice, tangerines, and rice cookers. On the other hand making up a new name for everything will easily lose the reader. So that's OK... except, when you say "rice cooker" I assume a modern device for automated cooking, rather than just a pot?

Another thing I just noticed (but not when reading it): it's not clear why his book was on the ground. He dropped it when he landed?
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Rogissidor
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Post by Rogissidor »

Maybe hard sci-fi​ isn't the right way to describe it. Dune had more emphasis on planetary ecology than it did on how the hyperdrives worked. Some things might be dream-like and not completely explained. In the Myst lore, some of the ages that the D'ni linked to had impossible physics or no atmosphere, or they were borderline unstable. This could be a reality that happens to exist but maybe shouldn't.

The mundane things are sort of a contrast to that. Sometimes an orange is just an orange. When everything has to be exotic, you leave people wondering for years what was the blue stuff that Uncle Owen drank.
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