Basics

The Great War Arc will be a series of plotted storyboards telling the story of a... well, a Great War. It is intended to bring in lots of worlds, and species, nations and characters from those worlds.

Plottedness: mostly moderate.
Not every detail will be plotted in advance, but we'll have a good idea where we're going to end up, even if we improv a bit while getting there.

Storytelling style:
Sweets asked if the boards will be in story-telling style (continuous ordered posts) or location-based board posting (a different page for each location, with characters following set routes between).

My thoughts are: story-telling, definitely. That's because I want to keep the flow of the story, and because experiments we've done with something similar to the other style haven't been very successful.
That's not to say we won't use those well-loved old literary devices "Meanwhile, in the Vampire's Castle" and "Let us leave our noble heroes for a time, and see what the lovable comedy reliefs have been getting up to". Just that the linear page format appeals more to me.

Well, those are my thoughts. *steps down from the mic*

Basic, basic, very basic plot.

• Worldgates start popping up unexplainedly.
• Tensions ensue. / Merchants rub their hands. / Scholars squeal and go nuts.
• Tensions build. / Arms dealers rub their hands.
• Lots of skirmishes and battles, dancing around (but not quite reaching) full-on war status.
• Another world is drawn in (? or something big changes). Emerging balance go boom.
• All-out War. Nasty, drawn-out. People die. Smaller powers are defeated/absorbed.
• Dramatic twist™ disrupts everything. War winds down (though this takes time, despite what some writers would have you believe) while the new threat/event is dealt with.
• Peace petitions finally get through.
• Follow-up stories, main threads and subplots conclude.

You'll surmise I'm hoping for a realistic treatment of the war and the mechanics and politics involved.

Very sketchy plan, but without knowing the worlds involved (some of which we'll need to co-invent first... shame! *chuckle*) it's hard to think specifics.

Gates

The way the War will probably work, and apologies if I'm repeating myself needlessly, is that gateways have been opening up between the worlds in question.

Nobody (yet) knows why, including me, but when Shade gets drawn in a bunch of delighted scholars will be on the case, so by the end of the war I think they'll be at least partially understood. (Could even be a turning point.)

The gateways aren't permanent, though - they come and go, some more frequently than others (one involved world is on about a twelve-year cycle, which means they miss out on the War altogether!).

There's lots of scope, for example, for explorers being trapped on a foreign world until the gate reappears. A gate usually appears in the same geographical area of the planet, with small variations, and on a (semi-)regular cycle.

A gate only works between two worlds. One world, however, may or may not have multiple gates leading to different places.

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What's a 'world'?

Worlds are planets (or other astronomical bodies: moons, hollowed asteroids, man-made orbitals, etc, the one requirement being that they're in at least semi-regular orbit).

I make this distinction to avoid confusion, because if you use the "Shadows" system invented by Roger Zelazny (as I think one ex-member did), "world" can mean "alternative reality" instead.

These worlds are in the same universe; it's possible to travel between them in a spacecraft. It'd just take a long time, including the time taken for the given civilisation to develop to the point of building spacecraft.

As you've probably noticed, I'm thinking in SF terms as well as fantasy. The difference is sometimes slight, anyway. *g*

To a certain extent, mixing technologically developed worlds with the more usual fantasy-magic worlds is very possible. The only proviso is that we want a fairly even balance of power between the sides, but that includes alliances and such, so that a weaker world might decide to chum up with a few big players.

In short, anything we want to play with, there'll be a way to make it work.

Here's how I see this working.

We work out the major details together, along with everything that spans or affects two or more writers' worlds.

That framework established, we're all free to write solo stories set on our own worlds, against this background, bringing in shared/agreed details where necessary. (This raises the possibility of a bunch of us getting published with completely different styles and stories of novel, all based in a shared universe with a Great War going on somewhere in the background... or foreground. But realistically, it's just fun.)

There'll also be a lot of cooperative writing of stories based around the main Great War arc - the big stuff. (Coop stuff doesn't tend to get any interest at all from publishers, or so I understand; this will be purely for our own enjoyment.)

On gates ('wormholes'):
I want a coherent science(fiction) explanation and system for these that we, the writers, can work from. The civilisations involved won't know this; they won't twig how to predict or control the gates for some time. Doing so will be a rather big advantage in the end stages of the Great War, and may even be a factor in ending it early.

Point-ears wanted
I still feel the need for a major expansionist Lightie empire, possibly made up of creatures resembling elves. I intend to make their animosity with Shade's elves a factor.

Heh. Sorry for reviving a long-dead thread, but this summary needs an update, because summaries are useful. I was just going through what we have about the war, and there are points to be mentioned here, for the completeness of a summary, if nothing else. This thread has held up remarkably well in the time since you wrote it, though. Your idea for it was rather a lot less complex than it's turning out like it's gonna be, though. :P

Some of the worlds are not astronomical bodies. Steamy isn't, and Eodea probably isn't either.

Also, me and Anke have agreed that multi-universe/multiverse rather than single universe makes more sense given some of the differences, and gives us more room to play around, including possibly things like magic playing up, if we want it to.

We've, or I've, worked out about the gates (mutt, if you could link to the gates thread here, I've forgotten the syntax) in a way that doesn't require either of those things to be as put there by you originally, anyway.

Re: the last point in our last post, I am tempted to get some elves in there somewhere too, I was thinking I needed at least one more major world. I've got the 'expansionist' down, but some elf-types wouldn't go amiss. Fae types, anyway; There aren't any in Steamy or Larkspur and I do love them.

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quote:

Mutt: How long was the war going to last? I can't find where we had the rough dates in discussion.
Vespers: bah, i can't remember. Decade +a bit, ish?
Mutt: I thought it was much longer.
Anke: I thought you said something about 40 years
Vespers: hmm
Vespers: yes
Vespers: original plan was shorter. then we decided longer. I not sure what we decided eventually
Anke: http://twine.hellhound.net/Magic_(Shade)
Anke: 32. XD
Mutt: Thanks, A. Now please promptly ignore all the magic details in that section. XD [...] I neglected completely the fact that of course they steal every idea they come across. [so in actuality, development will not be nearly as predictable]
Mutt: Iceheart's 15-ish when the worldgate events start (to affect Shade), and I remember it was ending when he's still able to stand and formulate sentences without losing his dentures, so 55-60 sounds about right. Weft is roughly 1.5 Instar years old at day zero, so 45 Shaded years.

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(excerpted/cleaned up from IRC)