Jammed on a small-scale low fantasy - "Chosen"

First off: Hi, everyone, I'm slvstrChung. Long-time contributor on the wiki, but never really gone here to the forums before. What I'm trying to say is that if there's specific etiquette or whatnot that goes on here, I'm completely oblivious to it, so please set me straight and I will do better next time. (F'ex, I'm not even sure this should go here instead of "World-building," but this seems to be for more open-ended questions, and that's what I've got, so...)

Simply put: after some exposure to the plot of Final Fantasy XIII, something germinated in my mind, and now I'm trying to get the details ironed out so I can write. (The reason I need details ironed out first is because I don't write well if I don't know where I'm going, so please don't say, "Just go for it, things will sort themselves out." No they won't. Not the way I write.)

The basic premise is pretty sound. There are two cities that are having a feud (or perhaps two halves of one city), and the first thing we're introduced to are Star-Crossed Lovers Celise Parrish and Coren Almaty. He's the son of a baker, which dumps him in the peasant classes, and she's the daughter of a merchant, which leaves her family basically outside the caste system; they have the bloodlines of peasants but the money of nobility, and nobody wants them. Anyhow, they're having an illicit rendezvous in the no-mans-land between the two sides, when the story abruptly takes a turn for the supernatural: they're abducted by "Sentinels." Sentinels were created (somehow, probably by mankind in some long-lost Age of Legends) to help keep balance and protect the natural order of things. They have enormous magical powers but limited agency; each one has a specific goal or domain and basically can't do anything that doesn't directly affect those concerns. So, on occasion, a Sentinel will grab a human avatar, a "Chosen," who gains an as-yet-undecided set of powers and a "Calling," which is something they're supposed to do. Coren is chosen to destroy his hometown of Hannety. Celise is chosen to destroy her hometown of Furell. And then they're dumped back in the no-mans-land and have to figure out what to do next.

The biggest theme in the story is the oppressive feeling of being a pawn in someone else's game, having your entire life changed unexpectedly by this moment of crisis, of having to live by someone else's rules. The Sentinels are seen as heartless and possibly even destructive, Choosing humans on a whim and not really caring about what happens to them after. But, since we're not that far down the Sliding Scale, my mains are able to Take a Third Option and move in some other direction. The problems erupt when I try to back-engineer a setting to make all of this make sense.

Some problems I have solved. I know that Coren wants to be a scribe and will invent the first mail system. I know that Celise's father hired Traveling People to run his caravans, which not only cuts down on his transportation costs but explains where Celise, friendless and without a mother, could have picked up archery. I know that Celise's father is going to throw her an Arranged Marriage. (They were chosen to be Chosen because they are Star-Crossed Lovers, so she's a little too taken with Coren to be receptive to her father's candidate. ...Though not by much.) Coren's father wants him to be a squire and then a knight, since that's just about the only option for upward mobility if you're a peasant. Coren's mother is also dead, which bugs me, but I'm not sure how a single mother would get along in a feudal society.

I know that part of being Chosen is an enhancing of any pre-existing skills: Celise gets a jump in her accuracy, Coren suddenly has no trouble writing. (Coren, formerly an indifferent swordsman, also gets some skill there.) I have not decided if being Chosen bestows you with other abilities; more on that later.

I know that the town was started there because there's a rich mine of Phlebotinum nearby. The division was at least partially artificial: King [whatever] of Brenicia and Queen [whoever] of Caldecost both said, "Oh, I know! If I send soldiers to that town, maybe I can take it over and gain sole custody of the phlebotinum mine!" There are royal levies attached to the phlebotinum caravans, and they will have to be dealt with at some point. I'm not planning to just sweep away the feud; that'll likely be Coren's and Celise's life's work at the conclusion of the novel. This is simply to say that reason can prevail here.

I know that Sentinels plant a Calling simply by providing a series of visions, which the Chosen becomes obsessed with; obviously, neither Celise nor Coren wants to burn down their homes and kill almost everyone they know, but these images are in their heads now and they won't leave. While they claim that they're figuring out how to stop someone from conquering their hometowns, the simple fact is that this requires them to identify all the weakspots they can find. Now they're experts at both defending and destroying their respective towns.

Those were the problems that were solved. Others are... less so.

I haven't decided what the time limit is on being Chosen. In FF 13, if you fail your Calling in FF 13, you turn into a zombie; if you succeed, you turn into a crystal statue, which is theoretically not dying (some people un-statue later), but is as good as to your friends and family, so it's also kind of lame. To me, the whole system felt largely artificial, like the Sentinels were just meddling. In my setting, I want the condition of being Chosen to itself be a ticking time bomb; if you don't succeed (at which point the Sentinel removes your brand and your powers), something about it kills you. The problem is, I can't decide what.

One idea is that you get access to the Sentinel's magic, and then have to learn to control it lest you accidentally throw someone through a wall—your friend, your lover, yourself. In the meanwhile, of course, you're channeling more and more Sentinel power, until eventually you lose control and explode or something. The problem with this is that there's no real sense of threat; it's not something that The Reader would say, "Oh wow, an author would actually do that to his Main Characters." The other problem is that, simply put, I don't want my mains to have magic. I want them to survive on wits and martial prowess alone. So it needs to be something gradual, but I can't think of anything like that either.

I haven't decided how Sentinels reproduce, how they pick domains, things like that. The obvious answer is that Chosen become Sentinels somehow, but I don't like either outcome. If successful Chosen become Sentinels, my characters don't have a happy ending, and I'd like to avoid that. If failed Chosen become Sentinels... well, I can see that backfiring really badly. Say there's a Sentinel in charge of watching over Middle-Earth, and it commissions some poor hobbit—Bungle Bangleface, whatever—to kill Sauron. Well, our hapless hobbit has not even made it out of The Shire yet when Gollum has his final tumble and Barad-dur collapses. Bungface is now doomed: he can't kill Sauron because Sauron is already dead. Like all failed Chosen, he becomes a Sentinel... with the domain of killing Sauron. newly!Sentinel-Bungleface continues to commission other Chosen to kill Sauron, who likewise fail and become Sentinels, until the whole of Middle-Earth is overrun with Sentinels trying to accomplish something that's already happened. Obviously, this model is not going to work. (My friend asked me why Bungle would keep obsessing over his Calling when he became a Sentinel. I asked him to explain how anything else would make sense.)

And lastly but not leastly, I don't have an overall plot. My original idea was that Genghis Khan is descending on the two towns with his horde of Mongolians, because he's discovered that the Phlebotinum can be used to destroy Sentinels. As such, Celise and Coren are not actually supposed to destroy their hometowns; planting that vision is just a good way for Sentinels to get them where they need to be in order to save the mines / the race of Sentinels. The problem with this is that I can't find a third option in it, and I need one. The whole Aesop just collapses if they decide to go along with what a third party suggested. They have to find an answer, themselves. (Note that people can visit from other geographical locations and enlist with our mains, so it's not like Celise and Coren are completely on their own. In fact, my feeling is that Celise's erstwhile fiancé will eventually become an ally.) (Also, killing off all Sentinels everywhere would have repercussions on the world at large that I frankly don't want to include.)

So, yeah. That's where my damn story stands. I have about 40 pages and I'm stuck. The final problem is the biggest, because I must have road maps to write well, but the other details are scarcely less important. If anyone has any ideas, any at all, I'd— Actually, hold on. There are some I'd probably reject out of hand, and let me explain why: I'm big on deconstruction and I'm big on Character Development. Anything that moves in a non-realistic fashion is something I'm likely to veto. But I don't think I'll have that problem here of all places.

Thanks for reading my dissertation! =)

Taking things in order ...

The Chosen are getting power from the Sentinels, but they're gradually trading their souls for it. As their souls erode, they become more and more focused on their goal until nothing else matters. If they fail, they lose their souls entirely and become zombies. Even if they succeed, they're left with partial souls and no purpose, so they might as well be zombies. It's possible that they begin changing to crystal immediately, from the inside out, and only become a statue when the transformation is complete; it's necessary to channel the Sentinel's energy. The first sign of the transformation is a glow from the brain through the optic canal, i.e. the eyes start to emit light.

If I'm reading this correctly, the job of the Sentinels is to hand out Plot Coupons. There's also some Jungian synthesis going on, but let's leave that aside for now. A Sentinel might be a sort of error trap built into the universe; when something goes wrong often enough, a daemon crystallizes around the recurring error. At some threshold, the daemon takes on life as a Sentinel. It has only one purpose, to fix the error. It has only a handful of options, one of which is to activate a Chosen. Behaviorally, a Sentinel can't act, only react.

To echo some FF themes, the Sentinels are not what they appear to be. Their ultimate goal is to destabilize the world's magic and thus destroy everything. For whatever reason, they can't do it themselves, but they can hand out loaded guns to mortals and hope for the worst. Or, to invert that idea, the Sentinels need help to save the world's magic but can't explain the situation in terms mortals will understand. They are too close to the problem to see it clearly because they're only programs, not programmers. The Phlebotinum is not the answer, but it's part of the answer: it's being used incorrectly. The barbarian horde is a distraction. Celise and Coren have to rediscover how to program reality, or at least rewrite one of its subroutines.

Thanks for your input. :) Because I'm an ornery son-of-a-bitch, I have counters. ;D

> The Chosen are getting power from the Sentinels, but they're gradually trading their souls for it.

Maybe it's my own blind spots, but, how could this be made dramatic? (Also, I'm not doing the crystal-statue thing. It's lame.)

I like your error-trap idea, but I'm going to have to tinker with it a little bit. They can't just magically appear because the universe needs one; the biggest theme of the novel, again, is of having someone step in and shape your life, and Sentinels need to be prey that as well. Sentinels have to be created to address a problem—and by something with some form of sentience, as opposed to a faceless, self-correcting universe.

I also like your idea to reverse the purpose of the phlebotinum, but the problem there is that I need to make it a Third Option before I can go with it. What say you to this: Genghis Khan is on his way to abuse the phlebotinum to destroy all of creation. The Sentinels who grab my mains (or Sentinel, singular, now; originally there was one that lived in each city, but now there doesn't have to be) commissions them to destroy the town because that will result in the mines collapsing (somehow). Coren and Celise's third option would be to learn how to use the phlebotinum safely, which requires nobody to die (except maybe Genghis Khan, if he's that nihilistic, but I think a lot of people will be willing to oblige him) and possibly even usher in a new golden age or something. The one problem I have with this is that the scale is too large; I'd prefer to keep things local, as opposed to teetering the fate of the world—mostly because there's got to be more than one phlebotinum-abuser out there, and technically Coren and Celise aren't done until they get those people to stand down. Then again, that could be my Riding into the Sunset ending.

Hmm. This is some good stuff. Any more thoughts? *grin*

Frankly, I'd be worried if you didn't.

Just a quick clarification. I haven't forgotten about this thread, just got busy.

My basic idea was that the people in your "Age of Legends" figured out how to program reality. They used tools and ideas to set up error checks, which would trigger alarms if, say, someone was about to destroy the world. Since then their knowledge has gotten lost or garbled, and their routines have degraded. For instance, it's now possible to destroy the world again. The system is aware of its degradation, but its response is to ask, in a very elliptical way, for humans to fix it. The humans, of course, have no idea what the Sentinels want.

Note that this is not The Matrix. Magic is simply a name for technology you don't understand yet. A magical ward is one example—you define it for a particular place with specific effects. Once you're familiar with the tools and ideas, the programs you can write are limited only by your skill and imagination.

In one possible climax, Coren and Celise find a workshop set up by the ancients. They can tap into the "reality compiler" there, possibly using Phlebotinum to write commands on an astral scroll or to power the compiler itself. One of the ancients, in a prerecorded message, appears to them (thus giving you "something with some form of sentience") and gives them a quick tutorial in programming. I consider the mechanisms of programming to be mere details, which you can fill in. They wouldn't use punch cards or CRTs, they'd arrange glowing symbols on a tapestry or dictate phrases to a magic quill.

Throwing off a quick suggestion about the dangers of being Chosen—some time after you're Chosen, a second Sentinel shows up to find out why the first Sentinel hasn't finished yet. Then a third Sentinel shows up to check on the second. Then two more show up... Still working on the type of immediate danger.

edited 11th Jul '11 10:10:24 AM by RalphCrown