Worldbuilding: Secondary world three musketeers/wild west

[jack]

I've always loved Three Musketeers. Yes, it's absolutely ridiculous, but it's so me. Oh, no, you can't say "he was ambushed". You have to say "he saw a musket barrel protruding from a hedge, and being a perspicacious young man, realised it was unlikely it had come there by itself; more likely it had been carried there as part of an ambuscade upon his person. On which realisation, he threw himself flat."

Latest writing idea

A hybrid three-musketeers/wild west. The idea is, to capture the *feel* of a setting where people take fatal risks. And also, have non-fatal duels because it establishes you as someone to take seriously (in terms of, not accosting, not in terms of, respecting your good sense).

So, secondary world discovered. Similar to this one, but unpopulated, with magic. At the right locations, with the right preparations, you can transport a human through, but not much else.

The magic works in a very ritualistic way: imagining repeating patterns, colours, concepts, in various combinations, triggers various powerful-but-simple effects, including plain force, emotional manipulation, and a few others. Anyone can do that in theory, but it takes a lot of preparation and dedication to learn the combinations that are actually most effective.

Magicians are in demand because they can hunt energy creatures which roam the world, which are useful for ££££. And because anyone with magic is like a musketeer or a quick-draw in the fictional west, people respect them because they have to, whether or not they like them.

Communities are a mess of whoever ended up there scrabbling to survive and bring a profit back to our world, people working for corporations on this side, arrestees serving a prison sentence in exile rather than in prison, etc, etc.

I think I can handle the magic duels and magician-magician interactions. But what are the communities clustered around the portal-areas like? How often can portals be used? Which of those political ideas make sense? What would the communities look like? I'm going for something like, a new mining town. What economic activities are going on here, what are the most plausible to ship back (given the constraints that you can't mass-ship goods)? Does temporary-transportation make sense? What other questions should I try to answer?

Also

I was also thinking, there is almost no chance I will ever try and submit any of my (rough) old stories for publication, ever, so I should probably arrange for them to be online somewhere easy to read. Probably on AO3 linked from my LJ/DW, but would anything else be better?

Comments

[ptc24]

Add in:

Recognisability: your magicians wear special clothing or have tattoos or are otherwise distinctive, such that everyone knows who they are.

Organization: all the magicians at least nominally work for the same organization, or a select few organizations, which in turn has a complicated relationship with the powers that be. They need to be fairly independent though. Assuming that the training is difficult or requires inordinate amounts of time or resources or trainers are rare or whatever - who's paying to train the magicians, and how do they try to get their moneysworth? Do you need... not exactly special powers, but execeptional "with-it-ness" like an astronaut or test pilot or whatever has?

Portals: you want to get an honor culture going. So, either the portals are very hard to operate - think of the ship to colonial-era America, where a voyage took weeks or months and if you didn't have money you had to indenture yourself for years in order to pay - or there's a partial collapse in law and order on our side, say, in a post-apocalyptic scenario.

Making it like the New World (somewhat hard to get to, but easy enough for large numbers of desperate people to get there), and not like say Antarctica where only rich nations can afford to have a presence there, I think is the thing.

Shipping stuff back: if we imagine a New World type setting, then gold is an obvious big one. Maybe all our currencies collapsed and people only trust metal money these days and the money supply is too low. Magical unobtainium (perhaps this is needed for initiating new magicians, or for dealing with the apocalypse that the world is post-) seems a bit cheesy. Perhaps you don't ship goods back - perhaps rich people transport there and back to have magic done on them, to get cures and to have their lifespan extended (to near-immortality, with regular enough rejuvenations? Powered by the energy creatures?). Perhaps rich people are planning to cross over en masse once the place is developed enough (or phase 2 of the apocalypse comes close enough) but would rather have other people working ahead to make the place safe and comfortable first. Maybe there's a food shortage, and animals or animal carcasses go through the portals reasonably easily like people (but not like industrial equipment).

If portals are fairly people-specific (or life-specific, or whatever) then you've got the situation where you're bootstrapping technology on the far side - you've got lots of knowledge on the one hand, but you've got to start with stone tools on the other hand, how quickly can you develop an industrial base?

[jack]

Thank you all, ideas being mulled over...

[alextiefling]

Regarding settlements: it probably works best if the portals and the valuable natural resources are in different - sometimes radically different - locations. So the settlements around the portals will be the bridgeheads. They'll be like cavalry forts in a western, or for that matter the very castles that were being slighted by government forces in the era of the Musketeers (see: La Rochelle in The Three Musketeers, Loudun in The Devils, or any number of English castles during the Civil War). From the perspective of newcomers from 'our' side of the portal, the bridgehead towns will be the frontier. But they're really company towns - the royal charter companies, like our world's Hudson's Bay Company or East India Company, run the show, with corporate scrip and private armies. These armies, of course, do not have perfectly exclusive jurisdiction - two portals inside the perimeter of a single town will lead to Musketeer/Cardinal's Guards action on a regular basis. And then you have the actual wilderness, and somewhere out there is the camp - think season 1 of Deadwood - where the unobtainium is mined, and the monster-hunters set out on hunts, and where trainee wizards prepare to go walkabout in order to experience the magical world in its untamed richness. And there, none of the companies has much in the way of jurisdiction - instead, they have agents, both overt and covert, who try to run the various freebooters ad hoc, awaiting the promised arrival of a road (or even a railway) from the town, which may never come, but which will bring proper corporate control when it does.

So even the arrival of three our four fully-tooled-up soldiers, from any faction or none, could tip the balance of power in the camp.

[jack]

Thank you all, ideas being mulled over...

[ceb]

Oh, Dumas is the BEST. There's an entire chapter of _The Count of Monte Cristo_ (which, I remind you, was serialised magazine fiction) where literally all he does is describe the garden path (but very compellingly!)

[jack]

Lamentably, while I loved T3M, when I tried CoMC I saw some of the same things, but I just couldn't get into it at all, I'm not sure why.