Some alien colonies were heavily polluted when warfare destroyed industrial waste containment facilities
Some alien colonies were heavily polluted when warfare destroyed industrial waste containment facilities
During the Shutdown War between the alien species known as the Arweli, and the Robot collective known as Groupthink, massive planetwide bombardments occurred.
Arweli industrial planets were targeted particularly as a means of slowing their war effort. Several times, Groupthink suicide ships equipped with a preciously irreplaceable drive crystals would jump deep behind the battle lines and into Arweli territory to unleash a planet wide barrage of atomic weaponry faster than the defenses of the planets could react. The resulting devastation of industrial facilities on the surface of these planets released unimaginable amounts of toxic byproducts into the environments.
After the war, many species including humans would make expeditions to these dead worlds in pursuit of resources, but would find mutated and degraded offshots of the Arweli species clinging to existence in the ruins.
(Sorry this is a repost, Beehaw defederated and apparently the original post I made disappeared)
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Quite an interesting tradeoff! If the drive crystals were irreplaceable and precious, does it mean that it was a last resort move from Groupthink as they would have lost otherwise? Did the sacrifice of these ships impact Groupthink's overall mobility? Does the fact that there are now humans roaming the area show that the robots didn't last for long after having Godzilla'd the Arweli?
Also, I dig the retro posing and coloring of your illustrations!
The suicide attack ships were meant to break the stalemate that the war had become, and they were successful in allowing the robots to deeply enter Arweli territory before being stopped. This late offensive in the war is why the Arweli government collapsed at the end.
The crystals have unusual properties, but the short version here is that they are required for faster than light travel, and they can not be artificially made.
The crystal using suicide ships were novel for a few reasons. It was presumed that the robots didn’t have much in the way of crystals, since they very rarely used FTL ships aside from their massive moon sized nodesphere ships. The second reason is that the robots did have a spiritual reverence for the crystals, which is another topic too detailed for this comment, but it was presumed they wouldn’t use the crystals in such a way.
The war ended with the collapse of the Groupthink and Arweli as factions. Their former territories were ravaged by destruction, and humans among other aliens who had been displaced for their own homes by the war flooded into this territory for land grabs or to scavenge the valuable resources left in the rubble.
Humans weren’t unified before the war, and their interactions with the robots and Arweli varied. Some humans, and human factions may have positive, neutral, or negative opinions on the robots and Arweli. Some settlements welcome one or both, some ban them with extreme prejudice. It’s a complex topic. I apologize for deferring so much, but a lot of this seems like it needs its own post and infograph!
Thanks for liking my art, I keep trying to zero in on an aesthetic that’s in my head and commit it to paper.
That's the thing with worldbuilding, topics are interconnected and often deserve their own diving into. One aspect that strikes me: the robots have a spiritual reverence ror the crystals? Is it the result of their primary purpose or programming? What were they designed to do at first?
As for generally not using FTL, is it because they can afford the long travel time since they can shut down temporarily? That would still imply a huge quantity of traffic in order to sustain their territory and keep regular control of it.
Did other factions like the Arweli make more extensive use of FTL?
Reverence result of programming.
Part of what I need to get into is the nature of the robots. They have synthetically created organic brains. The robots and their synthetic organic brains are created in the gigantic nodesphere ships. These ships are the size of moons, and serve many purposes. The ships each house massive crystals at their center, far larger than those found by any other race. The size of the crystal correlates with how large of a faster than light ship can be, and the robots are the only known faction to have such huge ones. The fact that the giant crystals are at the core of the ships, and the ships create the robots has something to do with their ability to access shared thoughts. This is a mystery both in universe and because I haven’t fully worked it out yet.
However the fact that the crystals are central to their creation does inspire reverence.
The original creation of the robots and their original purpose are unknown. I have some ideas but haven’t fully committed to any yet. The fact that they are human formed and that there has even been a successful transfer of a human consciousness into a robot body suggests a connection between them and humanity even though they come from a region very far from earth and their technology is clearly not like what humans are capable of. Again, I have ideas but haven’t committed to a particular one yet, so at that point in the lore I just make things foggy.
The robots tend to use FTL in their nodesphere ships, traveling as a mass. When a ship shows up, it’s like a planet’s worth of robots appearing.
All robots can collectively send and receive thoughts of other robots in range of a local nodesphere, which would be about a planetary system’s distance, and each nodesphere can instantly transfer all of this to any other nodesphere regardless of distance. Essentially any robot can share thoughts with any other robot anywhere in the network instantly. This makes their organization extremely efficient. A robot world mining resources will know exactly what an incoming nodesphere needs. In a battle, the situational awareness of the robots is almost total.
All races with FTL use the crystals. Other races only have small shards, but find them in decent enough quantity. The thing about the crystals is that they can not be destroyed, or physically altered by any known means. If you have a big crystal, you can’t chip off pieces to make smaller ones. If a ship with a crystal is destroyed, even if the whole ship is vaporized, the crystal remains. Hooking up multiple crystals into a single FTL drive to increase the size of a ship that can be moved is possible but extremely delicate and difficult. Most ships use single pieces of crystal sized appropriately. The fact that crystals have been discovered clearly smashed with fragments that used to be part of a single piece is one of the mysteries because nobody knows how that is possible. Out of universe, I am thinking something along the lines of these crystals shattering was the big bang and the beginning of time, perhaps to get wilder, their reformation back into a whole might be the end of time or would create a new big bang. This possibility is where the narrative for characters I have in the world leans as they try to stop that, and the robots and their religion are mixed up in it.
I like narratives that scale, and with my central characters, a story that goes from somebody working a dead end factory job trying to afford a better prosthetic arm that slowly scales into killing god to stop the end of time is the kind of thing I like.
I should also make the distinction between this type of robot and a traditional type made of entirely conventional circuitry and programming. Those also exist in this universe, and many races and factions make use of them to varying degrees, although the level of artificial intelligence of traditional robots is much lower and not dynamic or sapient.
Ok, if I followed correctly, then in that case your robots are more an autonomous synthetic lifeform, and since they even have organic brains, they are even technically cyborgs. So an army of tube grown Grievous, so to speak^^. Which does justify spirituality though.
The hivemind aspect is a nice addition, especially if regular organics can be connected to it. Though it does give a huge advantage to Groupthink, especially when space distances are involved... Feels like the Arweli didn't have a chance!
The dynamic around the crystal shards is interesting, very high scale if it connects to the whole universe being created or destroyed.
But given that there are enough shards even in that area of space to allow at least several civilizations to expand off of them, the task to gather them all seems to be insanely difficult, barring the intervention of a truly godlike being. Moreover it would necessarily mean that whoever tries to gather them has the power to detect them, even if they have been sent into a Black Hole for instance. Of course they would also need the capacity to retrieve them from there too.
I also like high scale stories, but they have in my opinion one great weakness: you end up needing to buff the protagonist to insane levels of aptitude and powers to be up to the task, and when they are there, they have nothing human or relatable left as a character. Like in Mistborn from Sanderson for example...
Cyborgs
Technically speaking yes, though I am somewhat hesitant to refer to them that way as it implies a naturally organic component. Thinking of them as Grevious is I think close, with the change that the brains are artificially made rather than transplanted.
Hivemind and regular organics
A clarification: A human consciousness was transplanted into a single, individual robot in the post-war era, after the hivemind had been broken.
As for humans, accessing a hivemind ability is something that was researched in-universe after the war. It actually lead to the creation of an extremely powerful side character, as the experiment went out of control and ended up with a character drawing inspiration from Tetsuo from Akira, though without the immediate self destruction spiral.
Gathering them seems difficult without a godlike being
I’ve got some ideas. I’ve got a highly powerful character that appears after the war. This character grows more powerful with more crystals collected, and formed a cult of robots as a kind of robot Illuminati, and some of those robots have some extra power gifted to them.
High scale needs high protagonist
The main three characters I have at the core, who are my most common narrative leads and window into this universe are skilled but not “super powered” or chosen or anything like that. There is the above mentioned Tetsuo power level character who exists but as a secondary character. So the powerful character exists, but the window is through more normal scaled ones.
I’m not sure how coherent and/or impenetrable this lore is all coming off. Everything in this thread is all in the span of about 12 years in-universe. A lot of changes packed into this time period since I tend to design settings around characters and events first rather than geography, which I’m terrible at making.
My setting wears its inspirations on its sleeve. Many of them are obvious and fairly mainstream, others are more obscure but I try to take what I like and blend them up to make a adventure-wester-scifi-war story-setting with mystical overtones.
Akira! A fine reference indeed...
About creating order
I find it interesting that you already seem to have your main cast worked out, even as you seem to be still refining core elements of the world itelf. You start out with chars, then events then?
About obvious references
I think it's quite ok having the DNA of the work plain to see, it's in a way more honest than to basically try to masquerade obvious calques as new ideas. Moreover, it can even become quite a creative challenge, trying to fit together different influences that don't necessarily work well together.
About scale
Personally I always feel like the scale of stories is what makes it hardest to import concept from one story to another. When "Galaxies" are in danger, you can't really take much time to talk about human drama for the main cast, as it would make them feel really egocentric or oblivious of what's at stake.
Regarding the geography-history conendrum
I totally get you. I usually have only broad ideas for the lay of the land, and will start creating loose pieces and main events that will find their place locally when I eventually decide on geography...
Usually it's eventually a back and forth, moving forward with geography creates context for events or requires adjustments, sometimes generates new events that will in turn need to be inserted in the geography. It's endless...
The way this universe came about was I would doodle on small post-it notes at work. I started challenging myself to create images within the confines of a post it note that were evocative of a story or setting. Nothing pre-planning, just drawing images. Eventually I started repeating character designs and refining them which turned into the reoccurring characters, and at that point I started creating coherent connections between the pictures.
I still tend to start with doodles until I happen upon one I like and then after it’s drawn I start asking myself what the backstory is for what I’m seeing.
There is certainly an escalation of the scale of events. It doesn’t jump right into the largest scale. It is a ramp up, where the evolution of characters reveals larger context. I think the maximum galaxy scale threat kind of element, once it comes into focus will be a very short climax, scaling back down once it’s over. The key is dropping a lot of context to that climax without revealing what it is until I’m ready for the immediate conflict and resolution. There’s a lot of Babylon 5 DNA in that aspect.
The universe will go on after that point, I just haven’t built anything in that era.
The character themselves are also not sort of blank slate 16 year old adventurers during this time period. Kind of drawing some Cowboy Bebop energy with all of the main cast being damaged goods. Each of them has had something big in their life taken away from them, and they’ve already gone through the giant space war experience so there is both a vibe that they are jaded, but also they won’t just panic at the sight of new events.
I’ve got quite a lot of side character content where those side characters are not as entirely developed, but I take the same approach of figuring out what damaged them and what they want rather than writing them as villain or hero. Except for my actual villains, they evil.
Good villains gonna vile^^.
The post-it method is quite interesting, I used to do something quite similar during my university years. I would draw a small square on my class memo or notebook and only draw within the box (in a futile attempt to keep it contained). Though I mainly did environments that way. I wouldn't enjoy drawing big environments anyway. Chars would usually span the margin.
Do you still have those postits kept somewhere? Have you tried organising or structuring them?
About blank slate v jaded. It really depends on the tone you are trying to strike with the whole story and setting, but usually it proves quite difficult to have a main cast that is solely jaded or has lived through everything already. The blank slate 16 yo are a trope for good reasons I think. They are just mature enough so that their reasoning is still relatable for an adult reader, but they also, like the reader, don't know much about what life is really like in the setting. They offer the opportunity to explain, or easy and natural exposition.
That's no surprise that there is Edward in the crew of Cowboy Bebop, you do need those curious types. But on the other hand, having only chars that have lived through nothing and don't know what they are doing is closer to a ttrpg party than narrative storytelling, so...
It's really not the original opinion of the year I guess, but balancing helps.
Well, I suppose it's not just that the characters had things taken away, but that they are actively working to get their lives back. It isn't just mopey depression. That is just the start. Like screenwriting says: Characters should start stories in a place where they need to change. I've always had a trio in mind. The woman who was a pilot for an independent colony militia during the war. Her dream was to be a pilot. In the war she was shot down and lost her arm and leg. She ended up with subpar prosthetics which didn't have good fine motor control, and her colony was destroyed so she ended up like many colonists becoming a refugee to a corporate run area. She became a low skill worker among a crowd of people scraping by.
Second would be an arweli former commando. He was a full patriot and his entire government crumbled and at the same time he watched a lot of cowadice and hypocrisy among the political class as it happened. He ended up being hired muscle for a semi-legal trading outpost run by a Lando Calrissian type. Starts the post war era not believing in causes any more, or at least trying very hard not to.
The last would be a former human corporate soldier who ended up contracting a fatal disease from where he was deployed in the war, and underwent an illicit experimental surgery to transfer his conciousness into the robot shell, which would of course leave him questioning if he was really even himself anymore and all that.
These would be the three that end up together and as the group that is the window into the world. While it isn't an exact parallel I think about The Wizard Of Oz, of all things a lot when I think of them, even though they don't have 1-for-1 motivation lineups with those characters.
Here's a link of post-it note and random paper sketches and drawings. Consider these like non-canon concept art. Quality will be all over the place as a lot of these were just made for me and done in one pass. A window to what I'm thinking, but subject to changes.
I love to see that kind of out of context sketches. You put quite the effort on the style and the expressivity of the characters and their situations, so it leaves an impression regardless of the level of finition, simplicity or technical quality. And in my book that's what such sketches really are about, even more so if you did them to get a grasp on what you were imagining.
Regarding your trio, they are all as you said damaged goods. Physically for the cyborg guy and the pilot, morally for the arweli. I imagine that it makes them complementary in a way, though I expected at one off them to be mentally damaged (wounded body, jaded soul, broken mind). Oh well, they probably all are to some extent.
From the trio, I think that the cyborg is likely the most appealing as a leading character (from an outside perspective, not knowing nearly enough about the story as a whole, of course).
While the two others are characterized either by having renounced (because of the injury) or given up (losing faith in the cause), the cyborg is characterized by an active drive, his need for identity... He is in that unstable situation that you mention by definition, while the two others are in a stable (bad, but stable) state that will require effort to drive them out of.
I'm also curious as to what could bind that ragtag crew together given that they are not connected via any conventional link (from ly understanding). They are not from the same place, they are not from the same faction or even species, they have no common history, their ideology -or absence thereof- do not match, and there is likely no outside force other than fate to push them to join hands. Maybe they agree that the villain needs to get what they deserve?