Yinfara Storyline

[Justintime9]

Shorah, Anyone have any Idea for a story Aspect for Yinfara? remember, this is probably one of the most Important parts. I'm sure we have enough concept art, and renders to get a general Idea of how the Island will be. Anyone have any Storyline Ideas? someone had an Idea for a sorta "Robinson Curusoe" storyline, anyone else hav any Ideas?

[Pryftan]

Here's the work we've done thus far, for people who'd like to build on it:

What if there's civilization on this Age, somewhere far from the little island, and the person who has built all this shipwrecked on the island, current whereabouts unknown? He started out building a home (so we link in the first hut, and then you see the second) and then worked on a way to get power (lightning rods) to something he was building to escape (some kind of motorboat). But he realized he can't rely on when the storms will come, so he studied the magnetic properties of the storms and built some sort of massive machine to attract them to the island. (This is also because I don't think we're anywhere near cycling weather effects, and I'd like to make this one of our first Ages.) You could track his progress as he worked on stuff and eventually find a little hidden cove where he has prototypes of what he finally used to escape. I think following a random prisoner's documentation as he builds his way off the island would be an awesome tribute to Myst.. very Atrus-esque, and yet not infriging on Cyan's material.

I actually really like your idea Pryftan that the fellow who was shipwrecked was a native. And I also like the idea of whatever he built attracting the storms. Maybe he could have intentionally decided to attract the storms so that he could be found (if they were advanced enough to track weather). Although he would have to find better shelter than a hut for all the storms that show up. Maybe we will need a couple of caves. (if that isn't myst, I dunno what is!)

How does he attract the storm though? Maybe the sand has some sort of odd quality to it? Or maybe something in it? (quartz? I dunno..) It would be interesting to see his civilization if they used this material for electricity or whatever. But it would be common knowledge, so he would be like "oo... this sand can do what I need it to". And then he discovers that the birds use the sand in their nests, maybe mixing it with something else. He'd then run experiments to try using the nests, and when he gets more storms to come, they blast all these nests like crazy, making a lot of glass orbs. (you can also have a side story about him getting attacked by birds). Then he builds that funky building. Or maybe the building is used to attract the storm. And he could have made it temple-esque. Maybe his civilization has a religion with gods (greek like?) and he's trying to appease them?

There is a material (called Berlinite) which is structurally identical to quartz but with larger piezoelectric coefficients. (Piezoelectricity is the phenomenon by which certain materials produce voltage under stress.) Earth sand is primarily composed of quartz - perhaps the sand on Yinfara is primarily composed of Berlinite? That would make it slightly more plausible that an inhabitant of this Age was able to build a lightning-summoning device out of materials found around the island.

Disclaimer: I know little to nothing about piezoelectricity, so take this with a grain of sand...er, salt.

Well, it's just my opinion, but I find it kind of unrealistic to think that a castaway would be able to summon storms, something that we cannot accomplish easily today with easy access to modern equipment, labor, and materials. How long did this guy live on the island, 3 years, 50 years, 200 years...? I think that if I were stranded on an island I would probably end up making something out of the industrial revolution for power before summoning a thunderstorm to power my machine with lightning. More along the lines of Robinson Crusoe, probably.
I do like the idea of a castaway building up machinery to help himself escape though. I think maybe some simple ways to attract help might be the construction of a tall lighthouse or the building of a boat. These items would have to fit in with Yinfara's cozy theme, of course. The lighthouse might be grown over with flowering vines and sprouting ferns in its crevices, for example. It might have decorative rock carvings on it as well. The lamp at the top could be powered during or after storms by lightning. Or maybe the castaway just kept dry wood up there and used lightning to ignite it to make a great fire. Then we could have some sort of Channelwood-esque elevator puzzle to get to the top too. Or maybe he just set about building himself a lovely carved wooden boat in a hidden place, but was rescued before he had a chance to use it.

Well my original idea was that the storms were powerfully magnetic for one reason or another, so he's able to attract it with some giant magnet or something. Something not too complex.

Here's another version.

Our hero shipwrecks on a strange island. His first thought is to build some sort of shelter. He builds the first, original hut, and is just getting comfortable and beginning to generate ideas as to what to do when a horrible storm hits the island and destroys his hut. Realizing he'll need better shelter, and noticing the result of the storm on the sand nests (glass orbs all over the trees that weren't there before) he starts gathering the orbs and building the lightning rod system to take advantage of the power as well.

So he builds his glass orb house out of those newly created and those already there. But after awhile another storm hasn't hit at all, and the native begins to worry about what his presence will do to a small ecosystem like this. (He's been eating stuff from the plants, some sort of fruit? and maybe killing and eating some birds?) So he builds the telescope in order to try and observe when a storm will hit. That's when he notices the magnetic interactions between the storms (far away storms locked in cycles around eachother, repelling eachother, etc.) which gives him the idea to try and attract one.

I'm not sure exactly how he'll do it, I had figured some sort of magnetism thing. Maybe the mountain's made of magnetite or something ridiculously convenient like that. (Or if we tie it into the reason the storms work the way they do, it won't be so convenient and it'll make more sense.) He builds something capable of retaining a charge (not too sure about this part) so he can use it to power his boat-esque thing, then attracts the storm, charges his battery, and is off.

I kinda worked on it as I went along, so it's a skeleton of a story if you want to add some better material.

Well, I don't know if magnetic storms are realistic or not... I just think that it's more plausible for storms to approach the island naturally, myself.
And I like the lightning rods too...my original thought was that it would be to hard to mine the metal for them, refine it, smelt it, and pound it into a lightning rod. Same thing for a telescope...you'd have to produce the glass for the lense and then form the lense shape, which would be tough unless you had experience with that. But both of these problems are removed if the ship the castaway was on when he washed up on the island was carrying a telescope and some equipment that could readily be made into lightning rods.

how bout, he was shipwrecked on the island, and he used the lightning as Power on the island, not to get off the island. his problem was that when he made a sail boat to sail in durring a storm (the wind is the strongest then) when he tried to push the boat into the water, the wind was too strong, and it tipped over the boat, and it was too heavy to pick up on his own. he tried building a shelter around it to protect it from wind, but that got knocked over, (the remains of which are still there) and then, he found a cave, it was hidden very good so, he had already tried many other things, so finnally he put the boat in the cave (which had a passage to the water, kinda like the area in secret room in the prison in riven) so he put the boat in there, and pushed it into the water from there, and the cave worked, and he was able to sail off the island.

About the physics; how about (this is no doubt some mortally flawed kryptoscience, but hey - it's a game - fantasy stuff) an ancient meteorite hit, covering a vast area of an otherwise well conducting seabed, with a dielectric compound, with the exception of the peak at the centre of the crater, which consists of ejected rock from below. I surmise you might get lots of weaker discharges around the perimeter and some rather nasty and concentrated storms building up over the island.

At that point, the thread went back to what it was supposed to be for, so the storyline development stopped.. now that it's somewhere else we can hopefully focus on it.

[ChaosSong]

It seems to me highly coincidental that lightning is always striking the bird's nests and this feature of Yinfara needs some attention:

There has to be something these birds are doing when they build their nest that gives it a strong negative charge. Perhaps some material they are bringing in from an adjacent isle. This adjacent isle may be visible from Yinfara's main isle - I bet it would have an almost permanent storm hanging over it.

Perhaps the puzzle that the castaway (perhaps even subsequent explorers) was trying to solve is how to get that storm over his isle...

[Justintime9]

ya, I... dunno about this Idea for a storyline... it just doesn't seem to fit...

[Pryftan]

Yeah, the psuedo-science of Yinfara obviously needs addressing. I like that solution and it would be easy enough to implement. I also like the idea of it generally being a sort of "eye of the storm".. like Yinfara is normally peaceful and pleasant, but not far off you can see this perpetually stormy island, and if you use the native's technology, you can actually cause those sorts of storms and change Yinfara's feel altogether. That kind of customization would be pretty fun, and explain some of the weird things we want to happen there.

[Justintime9]

yes... perhaps, kinda like Anonay, except the Island changes before your very eyes... I love it at a GoW meeting we also kinda had an Idea about different colored moons, like, maybe there is a symbol that u can only see when the purple moon in out... wat do u think?

[Lontahv]

I have an idea. What if there was a group of young people (teenagers) learning how to write from the Guild of Writers, and this bunch of friends were all working on one age together, these writers were very skilled (might have turned into Ri'nerifs if the fall hadn't happened) and were working on the age of "Yinfara" then one day the bunch linked in for a look at the soil, rock etc. (this was not the first time they had linked in) this regular trip to Yinfara turned bad when they found out that everyone thought that the other person was going to take a link-book back to D'ni(kind of like Atrus forgetting to take a book back to D'ni in the BoA. This wouldn't have been very bad because the Grand Master or parent would have waited for them to come back from the age and when they did not they would have linked in, but just about when they linked in the news of The Cloud and the earthquakes got to the place in D'ni that they learned the art/lived and everyone(Guildmaster, parents forgot about them--kind of how the original Atrius had to go to the guild and leave Gehn and Ti'ana) In this way they were stranded on the bountiful Yinfara. And this is why the architecture is very D'ni-like and why the machines and power is pretty advanced and the journals are in D'ni. But the most sad thing is that they never knew that D'ni was in ruins and they where better off where they were, they where pretty happy though.


How do you like my story?
Tell me what you think.

EDIT: The book lay under a fallen pillar in Aegura hidden from Veovis, Aegeris, the DRC but on a visit to the island in 2007 an explorer named Justin came across the book and brought it home with him.

[AtionSong]

I have an idea. What if there was a group of young people (teenagers) learning how to write from the Guild of Writers, and this bunch of friends were all working on one age together, these writers were very skilled (might have turned into Ri'nerifs if the fall hadn't happened) and were working on the age of "Yinfara"

This story would be fine OOC, but IC all the ages that GoW produces are literally produced by explorers in the GoW in the present day, so this really would not make sense IC.

I also like the idea of it generally being a sort of "eye of the storm".. like Yinfara is normally peaceful and pleasant, but not far off you can see this perpetually stormy island, and if you use the native's technology, you can actually cause those sorts of storms and change Yinfara's feel altogether. That kind of customization would be pretty fun, and explain some of the weird things we want to happen there.

I like this idea a lot. I don't know how much "story" it is, but it definitely adds a directed aspect to the age, as opposed to simply exploration.

[Justintime9]

Hmmm... so far that's the best Idea i've heard yet, usually I'm reely strict about enfringing on cyan's turf, but, I reely love that Idea, and perhaps we should ask cyan if we can, or something.

[Pryftan]

This story would be fine OOC, but IC all the ages that GoW produces are literally produced by explorers in the GoW in the present day, so this really would not make sense IC.

Nah, we're still planning on being able to make stories about "discovered" Ages. (See here.)