A Wild NaNo Appears!

Well, we're getting down to a month until kickoff, and of course I have a new NaNo rattling around. SO WHY NOT let's run with it and toss this out as another potential idea. First snippet of blah blah coming at you:

Setting: Sci-fi masquerading as a fantasy western. Takes place on a planet with some odd attributes and a few native species. The planet has very limited ecosystems – primarily sea, plains, mountains, desert and temperate rainforest – other areas are usually fleeting for reasons covered later, except for arctic forests and plains. It is a very, very large planet, and highly rich in minerals, gems and metals, but there are a few problems.

The planet received human settlers by accident. A colony ship got to close to it and went down on the surface; previously there had been warnings that the whole system was sort of a Bermuda triangle of space; sometimes you could pass through fine, other times you’d never be heard from again. The colony ship was attempting to outrun raiders when both ended up in the system, amazingly, they managed to get a probe off planet to let people know what had happened. But then the planet’s innate field started mucking shit up.

Basically, this planet, once you’ve been on it long enough, lets people use magic. Technically they are fiddling with the fabric of reality, but still. The longer you’re there, the more of the sort of living element accumulates in your body, meaning you can do more impressive things. People who have enough can (with a lot of effort, as does everyone else) leave the planet and still have their magic, but they need to find ways to recharge their batteries, as it is, because they can’t absorb ambient magic like they can on planet. They go through severe withdrawal, which can kill them. Most people don’t have enough juice for the withdrawal to be that bad, but some do.

Tech does not work right on planet, or near the planet. There is a single high tech city built in a wobbly column of a no-magic zone (it’s build on a giant deposit of a magic-absorbent crystal, meaning that as long as they don’t fuck it up, magic goes to the crystal rather than the area around it, giving them a safe zone. Natives with magic tend to be uncomfortable in the city, so it’s mainly left to be a space port and trading hub for offworlders and tourists. Taking off and landing is a challenge, as the column of no magic fluctuates and shifts, so most of the people landing are very experienced pilots who do shuttle runs between the city and a moon that is out of range of the anti-tech field.

Natives include a centaur-like species, a sort of harpy thing, and what the humans started calling sidhe right away. They’re hyper saturated in magic and are thus shapeshifters, mostly, and live in pockets that they carve out of reality underground. Their own language and such are impossible for humans to use (involving intentional pheromone releases and scents, etc), so they tend to pick up the human common language instead. There are two distinct types; what are called high sidhe and low sidhe. High sidhe are the nobles, they do what they want, and generally don’t come near humans often. Low sidhe, on the other hand, are the results of high sidhe getting frisky with all sorts of things they shouldn’t, like centaurs or horses or dogs. You know, that sort of thing. Low sidhe have less magic, more selective shapeshifting, and generally are looked upon as servants at best by high sidhe, animals at worst. So they like humans better! Low sidhe include things like horses which are just supernatural but otherwise only a little smarter than normal.

Humans have been settled for 500-600 years. YEAH it’s been a while. If you need to defend yourself outside the anti-magic city, best have a custom gun and/or a sword, and know how to use them.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Paradise Fiber Club Box - June: Enchanted Forest

The Largesse Box: Part One

Paradise Fiber Club Box - July: Merfolk