- Writing Levels
- Adaptable
- Genres
- I'm wary of magic with lots of rules.
On magic:
J. B. S. Haldane: 'The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.'
Clarke: "How romantic, if even now, we can hear the dying voice of a star, which heralded the Christian era."
Clarke: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Leigh Brackett: "Witchcraft to the ignorant, .... Simple science to the learned"
Charles Fort: "...a performance that may some day be considered understandable, but that, in these primitive times, so transcends what is said to be the known; that it is what I mean by magic."
On hubris:
"We can never be gods, after all--but we can become something less than human with frightening ease."
"Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God." ― Thomas Sowell
"It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men, and its own judgments for absolute truth." ― Aleister Crowley
Great leaps in understanding that lead to transcendence often leave behind the present state of mind. The Gods were omnipotent creatures bound only by frail, immature concepts of morality and ethics. What prompted such an enormous leap forward in power, that man became as children playing in a sandbox?
The most important problem that any species faces as it grows in size or number is that of available energy. By energy, we mean the ability to move a rock from one spot to another. The energy budget determines how big we can grow against gravity, how many offspring we can spawn, and what we can do in general. Since mankind descended from the trees, we have sought to increase our energy budget, by tapping greater motive sources like fire, large animals, moving bodies of water … culminating in ripping apart the very fabric of matter to release the incredible latent energies within. Ultimately, we sought to imitate the basis, the fundamental of our sense of wonder, the primordial source of energy that gave the randomness in the universe the energy it needed to arrange itself into us: the sun.
We achieved our goal.
We were unsatisfied with our imitations. The essence of our sun boiled in metal furnaces, but we could not gaze upon its brilliance, and altogether it was an amazing but not what we wanted. We wanted to bring the sun itself down from the sky, that giant ball of flame a million times larger than our land.
In the end, even the sun bent to our will.
But why stop there? If we could capture one sun, we could capture all others. We took to the sky, beyond the sky, we flew out deep into space. Eventually, there was no need for humans to dive into space, and we sent automated simulacrums, constructs of metal and silicon that went and gathered sunlight for us. One by one, the stars winked out above us, covered by great black cloaks that beamed their energy to us through stabilized excitations in the superluminal tachyonic field. The blackening of the night did not matter; with the energy of the galaxy at our disposal, we could create a new starry night, one that matched the ones our ancestors saw in their dreams.
At first, we collected the tachyons with antennas the size of the moon, dishes of tuned metal that siphoned far away sunlight into our machines. But that still placed limits on our imagination and capability; the stream had to be fed into cumbersome, inefficient machines that transformed it into the ability alter matter.
Enter Ilium, the eminent geneticist of her age. Enter Ysong, the eminent physicist of his age. Together, they devised a scheme where every living creature could grow an antenna, a gland in the brain that produced Feinberg's molecule, quantum-mechanically tuned to be resonant with the tachyonic field. With the Ilium lymph system, humans could wield the power of the galaxy from their palm.
The beginning of Sunne's end starts with a story: a story about a princess and dragon, read by a very lonely girl. Ilium was young, and like most geniuses her age, obsessed with ideals. She would redo man's ignoble descent from the trees. She would create the Garden Utopia from which man would have the ideal beginning, sculpted from primordial mud into perfect shapes. Ilium eloped with their research, shaped a man from wood, and imbued it with her lymph nodes. Thus were born the forest-kin, stewards of utopia. The first forest-kin she selected to be her Jade Prophet - Kairos, named after the dragon in her book. Together, they built the realm of Zmaragdos.
Ilium's disappearance greatly disturbed Utandis, the third of the intellectual duo, the friend, politician, and grounded one to the other two. Utandis alone worried for the future of man; Ysong never left his ivory tower, and Ilium showed an increasing detachment with reality. When the dragons emerged from the Zmaragdos forest and began to reshape the world, she approached the World Government.
The planet marched against her. They brought machines that could throw plasma missiles, focus beams of anti-matter, and were protected by shimmering force shields. From Ilium's Realm marched giant wooden men and apparitions from yore, clothed in bark that casually turned away the searing death launched at them. Unhindered by gravity, the walking trees grew into the sky, and flattened the machines underneath feet that spanned canyons. Ilium marched on the world. The world and all who lived upon it had become obsolete. Man had created God, and thus imagined himself out of existence.
Sunne was being dissolved and remade from machine, man, wood, and god. Mountains became caves, oceans became mountains, and water boiled into the sky along with countless lives. Desperate, Utandis implored Ysong for a solution. Ysong provided one, but tragically as an embodiment of the abstract search for truth, he once again failed to see the consequences of his actions. Using his design, Utandis built a giant anti-resonator in the Frozen North. The device would destabilize the excited tachyon field around Sunne, causing a catastrophic tachyon condensation that would darken Sunne and plunge it back into a veritable age of darkness.
Machines went silent, their fizzling silicon creating crystalline forests. Forest-kin collapsed screaming back into primordial mud, their compounds poisoning the forest, leaving behind exagerrated skeletons frozen in leathern webbing. The World Government's dying cry was to turn their collector satellites inward, saturating the eastern continent in deadly radiation and scorching all life from the soil. The planet tilted heavily on its axis, the north plunging into extreme cold. Ilium fled into dream time, Ysong buried himself in ice, and Utandis perished to the liquid fire pouring from the sky.
I really really really want to ask the players to explore the idea of temporal indistinguishability - was this in the future, past? Was this on Earth? Who knows ... Does it even matter?
Did the gods comes after us, did they come before, did they make us, did we make them -- ?
J. B. S. Haldane: 'The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine.'
Clarke: "How romantic, if even now, we can hear the dying voice of a star, which heralded the Christian era."
Clarke: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Leigh Brackett: "Witchcraft to the ignorant, .... Simple science to the learned"
Charles Fort: "...a performance that may some day be considered understandable, but that, in these primitive times, so transcends what is said to be the known; that it is what I mean by magic."
On hubris:
"We can never be gods, after all--but we can become something less than human with frightening ease."
"Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God." ― Thomas Sowell
"It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men, and its own judgments for absolute truth." ― Aleister Crowley
~
Great leaps in understanding that lead to transcendence often leave behind the present state of mind. The Gods were omnipotent creatures bound only by frail, immature concepts of morality and ethics. What prompted such an enormous leap forward in power, that man became as children playing in a sandbox?
Welcome to Sunne.
Three hundred years ago the gods went to war. No one remembers why, only that nature itself was ravaged.
Three hundred years ago the gods went to war. No one remembers why, only that nature itself was ravaged.
The most important problem that any species faces as it grows in size or number is that of available energy. By energy, we mean the ability to move a rock from one spot to another. The energy budget determines how big we can grow against gravity, how many offspring we can spawn, and what we can do in general. Since mankind descended from the trees, we have sought to increase our energy budget, by tapping greater motive sources like fire, large animals, moving bodies of water … culminating in ripping apart the very fabric of matter to release the incredible latent energies within. Ultimately, we sought to imitate the basis, the fundamental of our sense of wonder, the primordial source of energy that gave the randomness in the universe the energy it needed to arrange itself into us: the sun.
We achieved our goal.
We were unsatisfied with our imitations. The essence of our sun boiled in metal furnaces, but we could not gaze upon its brilliance, and altogether it was an amazing but not what we wanted. We wanted to bring the sun itself down from the sky, that giant ball of flame a million times larger than our land.
In the end, even the sun bent to our will.
Now war comes again.
But why stop there? If we could capture one sun, we could capture all others. We took to the sky, beyond the sky, we flew out deep into space. Eventually, there was no need for humans to dive into space, and we sent automated simulacrums, constructs of metal and silicon that went and gathered sunlight for us. One by one, the stars winked out above us, covered by great black cloaks that beamed their energy to us through stabilized excitations in the superluminal tachyonic field. The blackening of the night did not matter; with the energy of the galaxy at our disposal, we could create a new starry night, one that matched the ones our ancestors saw in their dreams.
At first, we collected the tachyons with antennas the size of the moon, dishes of tuned metal that siphoned far away sunlight into our machines. But that still placed limits on our imagination and capability; the stream had to be fed into cumbersome, inefficient machines that transformed it into the ability alter matter.
Enter Ilium, the eminent geneticist of her age. Enter Ysong, the eminent physicist of his age. Together, they devised a scheme where every living creature could grow an antenna, a gland in the brain that produced Feinberg's molecule, quantum-mechanically tuned to be resonant with the tachyonic field. With the Ilium lymph system, humans could wield the power of the galaxy from their palm.
The beginning of Sunne's end starts with a story: a story about a princess and dragon, read by a very lonely girl. Ilium was young, and like most geniuses her age, obsessed with ideals. She would redo man's ignoble descent from the trees. She would create the Garden Utopia from which man would have the ideal beginning, sculpted from primordial mud into perfect shapes. Ilium eloped with their research, shaped a man from wood, and imbued it with her lymph nodes. Thus were born the forest-kin, stewards of utopia. The first forest-kin she selected to be her Jade Prophet - Kairos, named after the dragon in her book. Together, they built the realm of Zmaragdos.
Ilium's disappearance greatly disturbed Utandis, the third of the intellectual duo, the friend, politician, and grounded one to the other two. Utandis alone worried for the future of man; Ysong never left his ivory tower, and Ilium showed an increasing detachment with reality. When the dragons emerged from the Zmaragdos forest and began to reshape the world, she approached the World Government.
From the Cataclysm came scorched desert, poisonous forest and viscous ice.
This is where we have survived and where the Three Nations have risen.
This is where we have survived and where the Three Nations have risen.
The planet marched against her. They brought machines that could throw plasma missiles, focus beams of anti-matter, and were protected by shimmering force shields. From Ilium's Realm marched giant wooden men and apparitions from yore, clothed in bark that casually turned away the searing death launched at them. Unhindered by gravity, the walking trees grew into the sky, and flattened the machines underneath feet that spanned canyons. Ilium marched on the world. The world and all who lived upon it had become obsolete. Man had created God, and thus imagined himself out of existence.
Sunne was being dissolved and remade from machine, man, wood, and god. Mountains became caves, oceans became mountains, and water boiled into the sky along with countless lives. Desperate, Utandis implored Ysong for a solution. Ysong provided one, but tragically as an embodiment of the abstract search for truth, he once again failed to see the consequences of his actions. Using his design, Utandis built a giant anti-resonator in the Frozen North. The device would destabilize the excited tachyon field around Sunne, causing a catastrophic tachyon condensation that would darken Sunne and plunge it back into a veritable age of darkness.
Machines went silent, their fizzling silicon creating crystalline forests. Forest-kin collapsed screaming back into primordial mud, their compounds poisoning the forest, leaving behind exagerrated skeletons frozen in leathern webbing. The World Government's dying cry was to turn their collector satellites inward, saturating the eastern continent in deadly radiation and scorching all life from the soil. The planet tilted heavily on its axis, the north plunging into extreme cold. Ilium fled into dream time, Ysong buried himself in ice, and Utandis perished to the liquid fire pouring from the sky.
After three centuries in isolation the Red Empire, the Green Realm and the Blue Republic cross paths.
And as expansion meets expansion, the word is spread...
...word that the Divine Weapons, dropped as the gods fell, are being uncovered across the land.
The Sundered World holds its breath.
Welcome to Sunne.
.
.
.
Maybe on Earth.
.
.
.
Maybe in the future.
.... [ooc]:And as expansion meets expansion, the word is spread...
...word that the Divine Weapons, dropped as the gods fell, are being uncovered across the land.
The Sundered World holds its breath.
Welcome to Sunne.
.
.
.
Maybe on Earth.
.
.
.
Maybe in the future.
I really really really want to ask the players to explore the idea of temporal indistinguishability - was this in the future, past? Was this on Earth? Who knows ... Does it even matter?
Did the gods comes after us, did they come before, did they make us, did we make them -- ?
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