Help create a a Post Apocalyptic Fantasy World!

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been kicking around this idea for a few years or so, and I’ve decided to flesh it out into a either a series of short stories, or possibly a novel. I am however woefully aware of my ignorance when it comes to things like plausable physics and other scientific principles. Since I don’t want to resort to “Magick” for everything; I’m appealing to you, fellow dopers to help out.

So here are the basics. One morning in the near future, everyone awakens to find that 3/4 of the world’s population has vanished! As if that was not bad enough, large and completely random sections of land have been replaced with areas in a pristine state. The borders of these areas don’t have any real pattern or reason to them and often bisect the middle of buildings, cars, infrastructure etc. In these areas, the new land is untouched and is ecologically appropriate for the region. New York City, for example has had nearly half of it’s total area replaced with old growth forest. This oddity has also had the unfortunate effect of bringing with these zones, quite a lot of the creatures of myth and legend with them.

  1. The change has not had effect on the general laws of physics.

  2. Population density of the creepies is random and limited to what was present in the zones that have appeared.

  3. Magick has an adverse effect upon electricity and vice versa. Where one is stronger, the other is cancelled out. The general measure of this is the ability to negate a regular residential load in a radius of perhaps 300 feet. On the other hand, a functioning substation will cause a lot of problems for the baddies; negating their powers, and occasionally rendering them effectively “dead” unless they are moved out of the area, or the current is shut off.

So, that all said, how has this change affected society? Can anyone come up with a somewhat plausable theory for the magick wielded by the baddies?

While I’m fine with my plot development, I need some help to make my changes to the world at least a little scientifically sound.

2

I have some great ideas, but you haven’t sent over a contract stating how much credit I would receive for fleshing out your ideas, or what my cut would be.

Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.

3

Well I can gaurantee you a hearty mention in the “I couldn’t have written this” page. As for royalties…well I think it’s a bit premature to discuss that when i haven’t even named and fleshed out all my charaters yet. :wink:

4

First, flesh out these “creatures of myth and legend.” Do they all come from the same mythos? Or do you find wendigo in Canada, djinn in Arabia, faeries in Europe, etc.?

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Also – why are the legendary creatures necessarily “baddies”? What’s their motivation?

And how do they feel about the parts of their world that have mysteriously vanished (and presumably been popped into that alternate Earth that is missing only 1/4 of its population)?

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Good Points B.G. To address your earlier question they are location appropriate, but have begun to migrate around as could be expected. While not all of the new arrivals are “baddies” a good portion of them are causing serious havoc with our remaining humans. While I have considered writing in the alternate world as well, I haven’t planned out too much of that for the intial plot line; though I’ll admit the possabilities there are intriguing. There are certainly a good number of them that are having just as many difficulties adjusting to their new circumstances, as the remaining humans are enduring. Many of the intelligent ones, like certain types of vampires are separated from their “families” as well.

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I’d make sure you didn’t duplicate the scenario in this book (and it’s sequel) too closely…
Footprints of Thunder

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Son of a bitch… :smack:

Every time you think you’ve gotten a reasonably original idea…

Honestly I was more worried about comparisons to the Magic Time series that was recently released, though It’s human population was changed into other things, while mine was transplanted. Crap! I thought I had a somewhat original idea there. Perhaps it will be better to write this from the opposite side as Brain Glutton and I were discussing above.

Good save. Thanks Meurglys. Well back to the drawing board perhaps. Still I’d like like some help in coming up with a plausable theory of magick and its effects on out technology.

9

That theme has been used extensively in “The Dresden Files,” except that it only works one way – machines do not affect Harry Dresden’s magic, but anything more advanced than a steam engine will have trouble when he’s around, and computers are certain to crash. This is because he’s a wizard, a focus of the energies of nature, surrounded by a kind of magical field.

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Not quite the same is MAR Barker’s background to Empire of the Petal Throne, where an entire solar system gets shunted into a pocket universe and the culture turns from high technology to barbarism to magic when extraplanar beings are contacted.

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There’s also S.M. Stirlings Nantucket trilogy and Dies the Fire trilogy. Due to an as yet unexplained “Event” in 1999, the island of Nantucket is thrown back in time to 1250 B.C. and its people have to survive in the Bronze Age; that’s a typical “Connecticut Yankee” story – what technology they have still works. Meanwhile (for a certain value of “meanwhile”) the rest of the world in 1999 suffers a “Change” which prevents electricity and powered machinery, even steam engines, from working, and gunpowder from exploding; 9/10 of the world’s population dies of starvation, while the survivors have to rebuild civilization using pre-steam technology. No supernatural elements except for the unexplained Event, but otherwise, both series explore similar concepts and themes to what you’re describing.

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There’s also S.M. Stirling’s Nantucket trilogy and Dies the Fire trilogy. Due to an as yet unexplained “Event” in 1999, the island of Nantucket is thrown back in time to 1250 B.C. and its people have to survive in the Bronze Age; that’s a typical “Connecticut Yankee” story – what technology they have still works. Meanwhile (for a certain value of “meanwhile”) the rest of the world in 1999 suffers a “Change” which prevents electricity and powered machinery, even steam engines, from working, and gunpowder from exploding; 9/10 of the world’s population dies of starvation, while the survivors have to rebuild civilization using pre-steam technology. No supernatural elements except for the unexplained Event, but otherwise, both series explore similar concepts and themes to what you’re describing.

You can read about both on Stirling’s website.

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Hmmm. Basic “plausible” theory would be that we just swapped pieces with an alternate Earth. Seems that someone(s) on the “other” Earth were working a major piece of majick that went awry and fractured reality along the ley lines and not all the pieces made it back where they started from.

Possible causes.

  1. There was a war going on and one side decided to just banish the other into another dimension and the spell was hosed by a bad batch of brass amulets supplied by the lowest bidder.

  2. A bunch of professors at the Wizard Technical College were trying an experiment that went wrong in a BIG way.

  3. A group of geeks at MIT have discovered a new source of energy (ley lines) and were trying to tap it to power their battle-bots.

  4. Government black project (Philidelphia Experiment) with the aforesaid energy source.

Enjoy! No need to worry about profits unless this turns into one of those Harry Potter things.

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This is also pretty similar to Palladium’s RIFTS setting.

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Project leader: Ponder Stibbons! :smiley:

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The Mage Winds books from Mercedes Lackey had displaced bubbles of land with assorted creatures, both magical and non, being carried along for the ride.

Just in case someone wants to read the books sometime:The cause was eventually found to be a very powerful magical cataclysm that happened in the region’s past—about 1,000 years before the events in the book—that ruptured space and time. The bubbles of land were determined to be nodes where waves from one magical “explosion” and the other in a different location destructively interfered with each other. The detective work figuring this out is a major sub-plot, with the main plot being coping with the side effects. People disappearing, odd creatures causing problems for locals, earthquakes, fires, an invasion from a neighboring land both blaming Valdemar for the phenomenon and using the chaos as an opportunity to attack, and a body-stealing mage from the time of the Cataclysm for seasoning.

Sheri S. Tepper had the books of the Great Game where psi powers (in the guise of magic) were fueled by pulling the heat out of the surrounding environment. The various abilities of Gamesmen were ranked and codified according to the size of their demesne (area they pulled energy from) and the overall effectiveness of their power. Enormous furnaces were used as sources of mobile concentrated energy for warfare, and one ability was storing energy for later use. They’d sometimes find creatures or powerless people (pawns) who had frozen to death when most of the heat was pulled out of an area by a powerful Gamesman exercising his or her ability.

The most important thing for you with your story is to decide on a set of rules, and stick to them. One of your rules, that where magick works science doesn’t, and vice versa, is pretty good. That’s original, as far as I know. Go with that. Maybe postulate from quantum mechanics that the presence of one kind of energy use collapses the local probability wave function into one set of physical laws or another (or similar technobabble). Set limits on the sphere of influence and in what is possible with magick vs. technology. Limitations are useful for creating tension and avoiding the “pull it out of your ass as you go along” school of plotting (otherwise known as the “reverse the polarity and run it through the deflector dish while clearing the transporter buffer at warp speed” approach to storytelling when related to SF.)

You might toy with the idea of trying to increase local energy use in one form or another to swing the balance the other way. I.e. get a bunch of magick users together and channel energy in a place where magick works, and then move into an area while holding onto that energy where there’s a power plant or something to try and shut the power plant down so that less-powerful mages can work magick there later. A powerful battery or capacitor could be a personal anti-magick device. A simple electric fence with enough voltage could be enough to deter a moderately powerful magickal creature or mage from getting into an area due to the magickal interference.

Work out how much magickal or faerie creatures need magick in their environment. Do unicorns, etc. sicken and die if they are in technological demesnes? Do mages rely on their magick to correct eyesight or other physical defects, or to enhance physical abilities? What happens when they can’t do that? What about the flip side? Do normals find that they’re able to unconsciously or instinctively perform magick when they’re in a magical demesne? Does magickal energy or its effects carry over into a tech bubble? If you transmogrify a person in one place, for example, does he turn back from a frog into a computer geek when he gets close to functioning power lines? If you throw a fireball, does it dissipate when it reaches the edge of the mage’s sphere of influence, or is it disrupted by tech interference?

Whatever you do, don’t include too much explanation in the actual story unless you want to make figuring out this stuff part of the plot. It’s a very good idea to work it out in your head, make an outline and notes on what’s possible and not given your system, but keep it mostly in the background. It’s for you to know and your readers to infer. Don’t explain things much, or even at all. Let most details come out as part of the environment.

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Not much original left these days! And he only used real prehistoric creatures - if you’re introducing mythic and folklore beings as well, that’s quite a change.

I’m not sure who else has utilised the ‘quilting’ effect before; there’s a classic story about a skyscraper that ends up back in prehistory with it’s occupants but I remember neither the title nor the author right now. I’m sure there’s a copy at home somewhere… And I don’t recall if the place they land is displaced back to the future to the skyscraper site.
Arthur Clarke & Stephen Baxter have ‘quilted’ human history in their recent collaborations so that all sorts of different human cultures are cheek by jowl… no doubt there’s more.

18

Hmm… how would the magick zones bisect modern cities without disrupting their power grids? Sometimes you hear about single broken lines causing entire neighborhoods to go dark… can’t imagine how the power grid would stay up when there are massive disconnects all over the city caused by random segments of magick zones.

Also, does the magick affect electricity/electromagnetism in more than power lines? Do radio transmissions get interrupted, do living creatures suffer brain failures, do pacemakers and hearts go out, does lightning never strike a magick zone, etc.?

Where does the canceled energy (either electricity or magick) go? In accordance with your #1, the energy probably shouldn’t just disappear into nothingness. Does it get spontaneously funneled off to another part of the universe?

Hmm. The magick doesn’t have to be a mysterious force from another world, there’s already enough stuff we don’t fully understand in our own universe and you might be able to hide it in that. The force just has to seem like magick to the foolish humans. Maybe instead of separating powers into magick and electricity, the baddies could simply harness existing electromagnetic energy, modifying it and redirecting it in ways humans cannot… something like how electric eels can naturally generate shocks and plants can naturally absorb light? If you tie the energy to creatures instead of landmasses/zones, you have more control over it and you can attribute a certain degree of conscious will to it so you don’t have to worry about mundane, non-deliberate interactions like the stuff I mentioned earlier.

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but it might be odd if traditionally “beast”-like creatures like yetis or werewolves could manipulate this energy in order to stop electricity in an area. hmm. if you want to have these less-intelligent creatures, maybe the areas could have certain types of flora that feed upon nearby electromagnetic fields and/or root structures that seek out and leech off large amounts of current?

20

Wow thanks! These last several replies have been just what I’ve been looking for. :cool:

To address some of the issues brought up, I’ll give away some more of the laws that I had settled on without giving up any plotline.

The tracts of land that have appeared and integrated with our world are like little chunks that go all the way down into the earth and up into the sky. They would have the effect of completely ruining most electrical/communications infastructure until someone would bother to repair, or re-route it. It should be noted though that while many, many cities have been affected, some have not an remain intact. In those areas, the lack of population is the primary cause of failure.

There is no real difference between the new zones and the old in terms of functionality of either technology or magick. The density of opposing forces in any given area at any given time is the deciding factor in what functions. It is of course reasonable to assume that magick will be stronger in the majority of the new zones.

The loss of a magickal field will have a fatal or near fatal effect upon those beings that depend upon it for their animation. Fleshless zombies, incorporeal spirits not bound to a mundane host and the like will find themselves effectively “dead” until the dominant field is reversed. It is possible that in this state they might well be completely killed by a hostile force. Creatures that depend on the field for their advantages like dragons’ flight and intelligence, will find themselves reverted to an animal that complies with natural laws. This process is non fatal, but leaves them in a feral state. I haven’t given to much thought on how this process would affect the permanant mental state of such beings. Humanoids will find themselves without the advantages of magick and will be bound by thier physical limitations.

Lastly there are “neutral additions” to the flora and fauna populations. Since the new land is mostly wild, and ecologically appropriate we now have a sudden influx of natural animals into our environment. On the great plains of the United States for example, a large herd of bison now roam about through some of the ruined cities. It can be expected that animals hunted recently to extinction might well appear in limited numbers around the globe. It is also reasonable to assume that other animals we haven’t recognized before might be popping up from time to time.

On the flipside, the loss of functionality of technology is mostly limited to electric and electronic powered machinery. The majority of magickal beings have the innate ability to cancel all other electromagnetic activity in their vicinity for about 300 feet or so. This is a general rule and is subject to the nature and power of the being in question. A demon or powerful mage might well have the ability to shut down all activity for several miles; a god could easily render a dead zone the size of most large metropolises. The magickal folk have had a hard blow dealt to them in that the shifting of land has also cancelled out any permenant spells placed upon structures they may have built within them. Just like the native humans, they will have to start from scratch.

While that doesn’t sound too bad for tech, consider that the more powerful entities can easily interrupt vehicle functionality, thus limiting our surviving humans to land based technology. While a few intrepid folk might try taking to the air, never knowing when your craft might fail or be assaulted by a flying creature has kept us out of the skies as of yet. Radio transmission seems to be the best method of communication that we have found as of yet to keep in touch. While it is often spotty due to passing magickal folk etc it is easy to use and reliable.