Product of Brainstorming meeting

[Paradox]

ahrotahntee = Basically indigenous humanoids found on the ages written by the D'ni, or at least what the D'ni call them. I am unsure what the word actually translates too.

"Ahrotahn" is a D'ni word meaning 'outsider'.
"Ahrotahntee" refers to a group of people or a family of outsiders. This word was used to describe non-D'ni people living in the Ages that the D'ni wrote.

[Gorobay]

I just don't see why you want it to be D'ni so badly, ChaosSong. As I said before, having a D'ni Age could be restricting; though probably not much in this case. I like the idea that you (actually we, because it wouldn't be really fair for you to take all the blame) Write something wrong and there's an explosion. Since we'd be just learning the Art, a few mistakes would be expectable. The explosion could be related to the disaster that befell the miners and chemists.

I was having a problem with In Cavern motivation for writing an age that has a problem to solve and a mystery to unravel that would be fun to play as an OOC gamer.

In this case the explosion-investigation idea works, but more generally, Ages don't need IC motivations to have puzzles. Maybe (IC) the Writer wrote an Age not thinking about puzzles at all, and when he linked there, it turned out there were some that had come with the environment.

[Pryftan]

Well here's the thing.. IC, I don't think there's a good way to make it non-D'ni in some sense. I don't feel like we as the Guild of Writers IC are ready to be writing Ages that end up being populated. That's an advanced notion and only the most skilled Writers wrote Ages with the balance necessary for it. Even if the people who built the machinery in the Age aren't D'ni, I think the book would have to have been written by a D'ni writer anyway. And if so, it might as well be the D'ni who built the machinery and then screwed everything up for the natives who did live there. Makes for a better story than some random other people messing themselves up.

You realize that if WE wrote this Age, the only way to pass it off is that we described everything but the machinery stuff and when we linked there it turned out some civilization built and disappeared in the few minutes between our finishing and linking to it. And since we haven't actually described anything BUT the machinery, I think that's a silly way to approach it.

[belford]

I have great faith in the Law of Wacky Consequences as an in-character justification for anything at all in an Age.

So belford writes a Descriptive Book, and he puts in various glyph constructs about the temperature of the atmosphere, the salinity of the ocean, the mineral distribution and chemistry of the land masses... and all of this leads to a world in which life evolved two billion years ago, became sentient, had an industrial revolution, and then collapsed.

My IC persona didn't intend any of that, but it happened. Maybe the D'ni knew enough about Writing to predict the consequences of their writing -- but belford doesn't, not consistently. And that's the story I'll stick to.

[Pryftan]

Yeah, that's the second situation I described. It just seems roundabout for this situation since we started by describing the machinery and actually have no idea what the rest of the area is like. It could be done. It just seems a lot more simple not to.

[Gorobay]

OOC we started by describing the machinery, but IC the machinery would not be described at all. The Descriptive Book would have information about "the temperature of the atmosphere, the salinity of the ocean, the mineral distribution and chemistry of the land masses", and then it turns out that the Age that meets all those specifications has a civilization. The civilization wouldn't happen in a few minutes (since Writing does not create an Age, it only links to it) and it is not unlikely that there would be one if the environment described by the Writer was conducive to it.

You don't think we're good enough to Write civilizations? I'm surprised we'll be able to write anything at all, considering how little D'ni is known. We don't know any gahrohevtee. If I can suspend my disbelief about learning to Write in such a short time (which I can, because otherwise this guild would be pretty boring), I can definitely believe that there would be sentient life in a Written Age.

We are the Guild of Writers, not the Guild of D'ni-Age-Finders. That would be the DRC.

EDIT: I realize there is a lot of controversy over that. From now on I will try not to discuss that in this thread. Whatever the majority wants, fine, but let's just plan the Age first, then worry about the race of these people later. If it turns out what we can or can't do is different than what we thought, we can change a few bits here and there. For this Age it doesn't affect the story much.

[belford]

Yeah -- I see no reason that the IC history of an Age (or its Book) should follow our OOC development process. The design process is always bass-ackwards anyway, with ideas popping up and influencing all sorts of details, backwards and forwards.

[ChaosSong]

I agree with Pryftan that the D'ni story-line makes more sence and would like to add that I think the community would enjoy it more if it had "some" connection to what they have been doing so far. The second story is feasible yes, but seems like more of a stretch to me. But I think I've said what I wanted to say and heard what I needed to hear; I don't have much else to add on the topic.

I don't think we're going to get around this disagreement by arguing on the forums; I think the best plan is to make both versions. The difference between writing one storyline and two comes down to that instead of writng 4-8 journals, we have to write 8-16 journals. Perhaps we'll toss one version out, perhaps we'll submit both and see which one Cyan likes better, perhaps it will become clear that there really is a majority opinon about it.

Any chance we can move on and talk about something else more productive?

[Gorobay]

Yes, by all means. Anyone who wants to continue discussing the nature of the Guild's Ages (discovered or Written) can do so in http://forum.guildofwriters.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=62.

Is the October 13th, 14:00 KI time meeting still planned?

[John Shockey]

Hello,

I'm new here, and perhaps I should hesitate to comment on a topic that's obviously a bit controversial (Should the proposed age be a D'ni age or not?), but what I have to say is not so much an answer to the running question, as it is a slightly different way of looking at it. If someone else has brought this up already (though I didn't see it in reading through THIS thread), I apologize. Also please forgive the use of "we" -- since I have yet to contribute anything (though I hope to do so).

(Let me preface this by saying that I think the idea that began this thread is a really nice one. But perhaps that's a different post.)

It seems to me that there are a couple of ways of looking at what we're trying to do here, depending on how much of an in-cavern element we want these efforts to be.

Either:

1)

We are a bunch of people creating an age and it's associated story (or as much of it as we can before the entire cavern's worth of explorers put their own stamp on it), which we pass on to Cyan in hopes they'll incorporate it into the overall story line. Perhaps Cyan will have the DRC release the age, perhaps it will somehow be "found" (maybe a book or maybe a Bahro stone) -- but in-cavern it won't be from us.

2)

Or we're not only writing an age and its story, but our doing so is ALSO part of the story.The age would end up coming from the in-cavern new Guild of Writers. The Guild might choose to make it available through the DRC, or it might not. It wouldn't just be "found." We might (and probably would) submit it to the new Guild of Maintainers first. The catch is that we have to write TWO stories consistent with each other, and with everything around them.

Despite the extra challenge (or maybe because of it) I prefer the second choice.

What does all this have to do with whether or not we are writing a D'ni age?

If we're going with option one, it could be either -- though I think it makes more sense to have it be a minor D'ni age.

If we choose the second option, it would be possible but trickier to make it a D'ni age. I personally think it makes more sense as a non-D'ni age, though I don't claim that it absolutely clinches the argument one way or another.

In the Myst Online: Uru Live forums there has been a lot of discussion about the theory of how linking works. (There's a lot of quantum mechanics, and collapsing of probability clouds upon observation.) It's not at all clear to me that it would be possible to write from scratch an age that was in fact a D'ni age. Cyan might well have an opinion on this. But at the very least, it would be a lot harder (speaking in-cavern) to write such an age, and it clearly would not happen by accident. In other words, if we wrote an age the D'ni had visited, it would have to be because that's what we were trying to do. The probability of writing an age that just happened to have been visited by the D'ni would be vanishingly small.

As evidence for the idea that writing a D'ni age might not be possible, consider: None of the ages that Atrus or Gehn wrote were ages previously seen by the D'ni. If it were possible, Gehn could have written his way back to the cavern, and Atrus could have written his way back to Myst Island. Linking books, as opposed to descriptive books, are different -- but they can only be written while you're at the place it will link to. (From journals I believe we've seen in-game, the DRC has figured out how to do this.) Yeesha seems to be the most advanced human writer, but even there I can't think of a case where she wrote an age the D'ni had already visited. The Bahro may be an exception, but we don't really know much about how they link; they seem to be able to do it without writing at all if the want to. But we're not the Bahro and I think it would be impinging a bit to much on Cyan's story to assume powers like that.

Even if we decide we want to ignore that argument, and we want an age the D'ni had worked in, there would (at least) have to be a very good reason in an in-cavern sense why we would have wanted to write such an age.

When Dr. Watson appeared in the cavern recently, and spoke about needing to find an answer in non-D'ni ages, that may have been intended as a hint that that is what Cyan is hoping we'll write. We can't know that unless Cyan says so directly, but given the above argument it seems like a good guess to me.

A couple of final apologies: First and foremost, that was long. I guess I'm not so good at brevity. My apologies.

And I started by saying that I wasn't going to try to answer the controversy directly, but merely shed some light on it. But writing this I think I've convinced myself that a D'ni age doesn't make sense with the second option, and I do prefer that approach.

PLEASE don't anyone take this as a personal criticism. I think the story proposed here sounds like a great one, and this is only a small detail. But small details are important in making the combined stories consistent. Maybe I should be looking for a Guild of Editors? (No, that's NOT what I do in real life.)

Thanks for reading all the way.