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

[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...