Product of Brainstorming meeting

[ChaosSong]

Gorobay,

I really enjoy the homesick Chemist. I bet the other Chemestis pick on him too. I also bet that his journal has the best formulas in it.

One of my thoughts was to assign out the journal writing, you be a Chemist and you be a Miner and write such and such a journal including the following clue(s). This sort of thing makes a great project for people who want to contribute, but don't have much time on their hands for extended projects. I think you would be great playing this guy's part if you want it.

Sabotage is another excellent subject to bring up, it should at least be wondered over but has great potential for a major plot element.

The map is great! I especially like the gas delivery system you designed there.

Not to step on your ideas at all, but let me have a turn now and put out what is in my head:

This age was Written with an extrordinary amount of silicone and a very slowly declining temperatue starting in the extreme high temperatures and cooling off through millions of years down to a habitible climate, prehaps it is a rouge - slowly escaping the pull of a star, perhaps the star is it's orign. It begins as a boiling mass of molten glass that cools from the surface to the core sealing all that energy in a planetoid-sized and very wet and dirty glass sphere with a bizarre and distorted surface. Of couse a large number of "bubbles" are created by the conflict between the energy below and the entropy above, this network of bubbles create "seams" containing different types of heavy gasses. Bio-friendly gasses are light enough to float to the top but heavy enough to remain in the gravity. "Dirt" is rare in this landscape, but exists in clumps and we do have at least one ocean, as a minimal justification for supporting life.

That last bit is appallingly bad science, but maybe we can get away with it. Pryftan, I might need you to call up your Gifted Writer character to justify this mess.

The natives are total primitaves, but uncannily intellegent; they are in bad shape because food is so tight and the environment is less than friendly. Somehow, we managed to strike a deal with them in which they help us extract the gasses in exchange for aid and evacuation (uhoh, I hope I don't need to bring in the Healers Guild!). Mining this age is a process of drilling long shafts through the glass at precise angles and then sucking or pumping the trapped gas into storage.

The mine itself is less of a cave and more of a rig, I'm dying for a scanner right now so I can just show it to you. But take a look at this site to get a vauge idea of what I'm talking about:

http://www.asteroidmines.net/documents/MiningRig/RigForMining.html

Imagine this rig deployed on our planetoid with those spikes drilling deep into the surface. Of course, I don't think ours came from outer space like this guy, also it should be much more homey and spacious inside.

The "gear door" is not so much a machine designed to open a door, but more of a gear that must be shifted to gain access to the door. Perhaps this room was the "industral linking chamber" designed to bring large gas containers (and perhaps refugees) back to the cavern. The heavy equipment's orignal purpose could have been to deploy large tanks of gas. This room is a good candidate for the epicenter of the destruction.

A possible reward could be a little garden age that was intended to be the destination for the evacuated natives, I'm leaning towards an unsucessful evacuation, so it would be perpetually ready to recieve people who will never show up. If Cyan loves us maybe we can even make it a global area.

Okay that's enough to chew on for right now, tell me what you like and what you don't.

[Jennifer_P]

Just wondering, but is there a reason you want to have native inhabitants? They don't really seem to add to the story much...

But anyway, you just HAVE to look at this picture of Hyperion, Saturn's "spongy" moon and read the paragraph below. It's really short, and I think it's a lot like your vision for the asteroid. This is one of the weirdest objects in our solar system!
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070128.html

[Gorobay]

Jennifer_P: The reason I want to have native inhabitants is that they wouldn't be able to link out in a disaster, whereas we or the D'ni can. Since in my version of the story a big part was following the escape routes of these two groups, it wouldn't make sense unless it was people that had no linking books. They would add to the story infinitely if we got rid of us and the D'ni and said they weren't actually that primitive and they did everything themselves, because then they would be the entire story.

ChaosSong:

The mine itself is less of a cave and more of a rig

If it is a rig, how does evacuation of natives make sense? A rig is smaller than a mine and probably easier to evacuate from, without digging tunnels, which gets rid of one whole part of the map. And I personally like mines.

I'm leaning towards an unsucessful evacuation, so it would be perpetually ready to recieve people who will never show up.

That is kind of mean of us, isn't it? We all link to our Reltos when the disaster happens and leave them stranded there, and they don't even make it out? I'm thinking of an age that doesn't reflect so badly on us.

I think that all this story should have happened a while ago, before we wrote the link. They did everything themselves (or the D'ni did oversaw the operation; I can see them leaving the natives trapped) and then when the disaster happened they evacuated the mine, but not the age. The age is fine to live on, maybe not wonderful, but not as bleak as you made it. I prefer a mine because it is more interesting to evacuate from a mine than a rig, since a mine is underground and cut off from the world, and in a rig you just open the door. I was thinking the reward is a part of the surface of the age, and not a separate garden age. It needn't be nice and pretty like a garden, but spectacular.

EDIT: Why do you want a rig? This is a serious question. If there is one particular part of a rig that you like maybe that could be incorporated into the mine without totally changing it.

[ChaosSong]

Thanks for the pic Jennifer_P, that's exactly the sort of thing I was thinking of for the planetoid. No natives is a thought we shouldn't just toss out, this would necessitate that the rig (and/or cavern) be highly automated which fits well in the setting anyways. Maybe these guys messed up bad and couldn't access their links, maybe this is more of an assassination. Who would do such a thing, and why? What if there is one native?

Gorobay, I had in mind a much bigger rig than that little asteroid miner, it wouldn't need to travel through space so can be much bigger and less aerodynamic, the door out could be the one at the end that is not accessible because of the damage. I'm going to try to get to my buddie's place at some point today so I can borrow his scanner and share a sketch, give you a better idea of what I'm thinking of.

Maybe we tried our darnedest to get them out but the sabotage ruined that plan, some of our characters could express remorse before panic linking out. The plan in my version is to get them off of that doomed little rock. Your escape party plan can happen shortly after the disaster itself.

I like your version also and nothing is set is stone, I'd really enjoy hearing a third or fouth story line if anyone else has thoughts about it.

[Gorobay]

I have a suggestion for how to reconcile "we overseeing the natives mining" versus "the natives left before we even linked there". We write the age, telling everyone in the cavern that we will use it to mine gases for a new fuel. Then we go there, and it turns out there are natives already there, already mining gases. However, they are primitive. Their mines are rudimentary. Maybe their planet is pretty awful, as you suggested. Anyway, the writers get together and decide that we can't just take over their world because they lived there first and it wouldn't be fair. But we still want the gas.

So we trade with them. We learn their language. We give them machinery to mine more efficiently with. In exchange for that they agree to give us a certain amount of mined gas when we drop by every [fill in period of time]. Since we make the machinery or use fixed-up D'ni stuff, it can have D'ni symbols and writing and number puzzles all over it. Anyway this trade goes on for a while until one day we come for our shipment of gas... and they aren't there! There was an accident... or sabotage! We translate their journals to see if we can understand what happened. We invite explorers to come in and look around.

That is IC. OOC, the whole time that we are IC receiving shipments of gas, we are actually building the age. So IC the age is written weeks or months before it is accessible to the public, because we don't want people disrupting the natives. OOC it is because we aren't done yet. When the age is ready, that will be when the explosion is.

This idea makes it so there can be as much cool D'ni stuff as you want, because we bring it there; there is no convoluted reason why we didn't help them or weren't able to evacuate them (we didn't know about until the next gas pick-up day); and it is exciting because we can start the story before the age is even finished. All round I'd say this is a Great Compromise.


About the rig... I think part of the problem is I don't exactly know what you mean by that. I envision a rig as a long pipe sticking into the ground. Obviously that's not what you mean.

[ChaosSong]

At this point in the process, I don't want to rule out any versions of the story, I want to collect lots of different ideas and get many opinions on what is the best story.

I'm enjoying thinking about variations with one or no natives at the moment, this would satisfy the improbility of writing a culture on the first try. Another thought that occured to me is an Easter Egg of sorts just for the Maintainers. Some danger they have to defuse before it's safe for explorers.

About the rig... I think part of the problem is I don't exactly know what you mean by that. I envision a rig as a long pipe sticking into the ground. Obviously that's not what you mean.

I have a sketch now, but it will be 9pm - 12pm EST 'til I can get it scanned and posted. Picture a smaller version of the Cloud City on Bespin with the asteroid miner attached to the bottom and deployed underground.

[Gorobay]

Well an Easter egg would be easy: the explosion actually happens when the maintainers go there!

[Gorobay]

Riven was Gehn's fifth age. On the fifth try, he linked to a culture. He learned the art through years of trial and error, by himself.

I don't know what Cyan's explanation will be concerning our quick mastering of the art. Somehow we do it though. There are many of us, not just one. Whatever the explanation is, it probably is not trial and error. If Gehn could do it on the fifth try, why couldn't we, with our better resources, do it on the first?

(And also, it is cool to have natives and I think the story is much more mysterious and interesting with them included.)

[BAD]

There is no reason to think we learned the art or writing in a short period of time. The cavern has been open for years, and it is possible (especially when it is a group effort) that within 5 or 6 years a group of explorers could begin to write ages.

When we do start the story (IC version) of the guilds formation, we can say that we have had a secret benefactor, or something similar. Perhaps someone we have never actually met, but has left us clues as to how writing works. Since as explorers we would have the ability to dedicate our time to whatever interested us the most, I think it is completely plausible that some of us dedicated ourselves to trying to unlock the mystery of writing.

Remember that the reason the D'ni spent so long learning before being allowed to write, is because they had very sophisticated rules and religious ways that prevented them from creating ages that would fail.

We do not have to abide by those rules. It might be interesting at some point we release a "fixed" age that initially failed, but we had found a way to make it stable once we had a better grasp on the art.

Plus I think our first ages will be rather simpler and they will improve as we keep learning and creating.

[ChaosSong]

Okay let's connect some of the dots here.

The catwalk leads to the gear-blocked door. The gear was not intended to block the door, the whole assembly fell over and it just fell that way. In it's original confirguation, the gear moved the bar back and forth, but now the bar is wedged and turning the gear will make it climb up and snap the shaft again, this time to fall over clearing access to the door.

The "arrow-head" is the main drill bit that burrows straight down like the rigs Gorobay was thinking of. Once deployed underground, secondary drill bits drill shafts at odd angles to get to the gasses. Maybe the drill is deeper and one of the secondary shafts is angled up to the surface.