A Look Back at Korad: II: The World

Last week I talked about the process behind Korad. Now let’s examine the content.

The risk with any creative collaboration between a large group is of a plunge into the mushy middle. If the hallmark of superlative work is individual vision, crowd-sourced creation threatens to settle on bland consensus.

Yet Korad is anything but bland. It sidesteps trad fantasy tropes: for example, by choosing as its major inhuman races discorporate “body snatchers” and a refreshingly sympathetic take on the ghoul motif. Though its general vibe is more ancient than medieval, it eschews the influence of any one identifiable earth culture. Koradi culture has the depth and internal contradictions of any historical empire, without owing too much to any one of them.

It’s certainly not a world I would have come up with on its own. The unpredictability of its creation lends it the lived-in feel, the paradoxes that lend it believability.

In any vote-based project, a pattern soon makes itself apparent. Decisions tend to fall on a sweet spot in an emergent spectrum. Where a particularly brilliant or engaging choice comes up, the vote result may fall outside the sweet spot, serving as a distinguishing exception.

For example, in the old Angels and Operators play-by-blog game, the continuum was between caution and heedlessness. Instructions for our delusional-or-is-he protagonist showed a marked preference for seeking more information over other choices. Because this was so clear and obvious a choice, I learned to write the choices to take it out of consideration. After that, voters arrived at a collective compromise between risk and inaction.

Here the ends of the continuum were the practical and the whimsical. Votes generally clustered at a compromise point between these two extremes. Anything too prosaic lost out, as did the most far-out or absurd choices. The many-headed voter preferred a fantastical world anchored in an accessible logic. But not too logical—collective wisdom wanted their magic stones fungible and poetic, rather than basing them a rigorous extrapolation.

A secondary tension arose for Koradi culture. The brief was to create a strong-seeming empire with a glass jaw, one on the verge of a centuries-long ideological collapse. Ultimately the group chose to make Koradi culture largely unsympathetic to a modern audience, in its austerity and opposition to frivolity. Yet a strong faction worked to make the crumbling empire somewhere their fictional protagonists and player characters would like to live.

Although a changing blogscape promises diminishing returns for a continuing Korad experiment, we made a pretty cool world along the way. If you contributed ideas or voted on those of others, now’s the time to give yourself a pat on the back. Or perhaps toast yourself with a fine Winecoast vintage.

A Look Back at Korad I: The Process

Since June 2010 this blog has hosted the Korad experiment, an exercise in group world-building. The final fact we learned about Korad concerns its nominal future. We selected the three candidates for a future ideology which will one day supersede the empire's dominant worldview. As determined by you, they are:
Candlism, a stoic blend of religion and philosophy.
Satirism: a working-class magical movement subverting official opposition to frivolity
Symbotomism: a movement determined to eradicate Aesigil influence, at the cost of also destroying written language
My original intention was to use the world creation as a prelude to another play-by-blog exercise, along the lines of Angels and Operators. As you may guess from the opening clause of the previous sentence, I’ve reconsidered and will no longer be going ahead with that.
It used to be that an ongoing feature, like Korad or Angels and Operators, offered me an acceptable trade-off on the time versus inspiration scale. They took more time to write than the average blog post, but they reliably provided a guaranteed topic for one slot a week. The Hamlet analysis proved even more fruitful, leading as it did to a gratifyingly successful book, Hamlet’s Hit Points, and acting as inspiration for my upcoming new game engine, DramaSystem.
Even more so than a year ago, a blog designed to attract an audience thrives on one-time clicks from social media platforms. Ongoing features did well back when LiveJournal was still a growing concern, and users reloaded their friends page on a habitual basis. Readership for LJ has been slowly deflating over the past year, in part prompting my exodus to the new blog. In the social-click driven environment, which I can now measure with a reasonable degree of accuracy, repeat features lose attention after a while. Those with a play-by-blog format suffer doubly, from what might be called the Babylon 5 effect. They require a high degree of investment and are hard to catch up with if you don’t jump on board from the outset. Given the challenges of LJ’s decline and timing of the move to the new blog, we still had great participation on the world-building end. However, in the new environment or paradigm or whatever it is, I don’t see a play-by-blog series as the best use of my limited outreach time in future.
What I was going to do was have commenters play, to whatever extent they wanted, influential members of the chosen ideology. I’m betting the collective would have chosen Satirism, with few participants rooting to play either stoics or destroyers of literacy. Each play session would present a turning point, where the group would have to decide how to handle a crisis affecting the movement from within and without. Each turn would jump forward in time, allowing for multi-generational play as the ideology adapted itself to changing historical circumstances.
If I had the time to do this, which I’m sure I don’t, I might attempt to do the play over on Google+. It’s new and shiny; its circle feature and discussion orientation might prove more amenable to play-by-blog than a standard comments arrangement.
I’ll do one more blog post, looking at what we’ve learned about world-building from this collective process. In the meantime, though, it’s time to throw Korad’s fate open to you. My final version of the resulting world bible, has now been uploaded to Scribd. The document and its underlying intellectual property are, as always, public domain. You are free to do what you want with it. Peruse it. Change it. Use it as a setting for fiction, your home game, or a published RPG. If you do choose to do something with it, be sure to check in with a report.

Korad: Ideology Vote Redux

Okay, the process by which we vote by liking comments clearly isn’t panning out. It requires people to remember to give a blog post a second look. When I put it that way, the flaw inherent in the system becomes obvious. So, one last time, let’s review the choices and vote with a poll over on the old mothership.

One of these ideologies will grow from obscurity to change Korad. Two others will do likewise to test the mettle of the eventual victor. I have taken the liberty of renaming some of the choices into handy -ism forn. They are:

Candlism. “The Candle in the Darkness” is a stoic path that blurs the line between religion and philosophy. The Candle in the Darkness is a school of thought that focuses on sharp rationality and observed phenomena. Gods are discussed in the same tone as ghosts and chivari apes - to be studied and respected exactly as much as direct observation suggests is necessary. While not, strictly speaking, an atheist movement, The Candle in the Darkness has the scorn and hatred of the religious organizations for the way it denounces faith and prayer.

Gentility. The Gentle Prince, a warrior demiurge, turned his back on the strife and violence associated with the Black Goat of the Fens and built a land of peace and ease. All who accept his path have a place prepared for them there. The Gentle Prince teaches loving submission to those greater than yourself and forgiveness for all who ask it. Surrendering to the will of the Gentle Prince (and his clergy) guarantee a place in paradise after death, and protection from the violent and hateful ways of the Black Goat and her angry children.

Nonism: Based on the teachings of nine masters who have since elevated to divinity through perfection of their philosophical purity. Themes include grace, beauty, and aesthetic excellence in one's duties. The Glorious Nine teach that a useful thing is wonderful, but a thing that is useful and beautiful brings us closer to unity with the godhead, and that a joyful heart is as important as a clever mind.

Satirism: Koradian freedman culture is often overlooked, largely because of the permanent second-class, yet not actually oppressive, citizenship that it imposes. Still, it was probably inevitable that certain of its members would turn to magic (the traditional pastime of slightly disreputable social classes everywhere); and it was probably also likely that said magic would break a mainstream Koradian taboo (in this case, the one against frivolity). Needing to keep said frivolity hidden from obvious discovery meant that its practitioners needed to grow adept at hidden meanings of texts and subtle shadings of speech: a Satirist spell is typically a well-disguised mockery of an existing artistic form, with a direct ratio between the power of the spell and the subtlety of the mockery. It is said that a true adept can transmit a blessing or a curse in a simple "Good morning." And then it was discovered that the spell for ensuring the sex of a child was easily within the powers of the adepts... provided that the woman who was the target of the spell accepted the central teaching of the Satirists: "Life is absurdly good." Which sounds a lot more transgressive in the original.

Symbotomism combines anti-Aesigil views with extreme devolutionism. They believe that the Aesigils have had undue influence on the development of human civilization and culture, and it is now necessary to expunge all symbols used to adorn bodies, clothing, architecture... even going so far as to advocate the destruction of all written records and language itself. Humans will become perfect when they develop their own thoughts and language without Aesigil influence.

Head over to LJ to vote for your favorites.

Korad: Call For Votes

Suggestions are in for the three ideologies that will rise to challenge the old order in Korad. If you haven’t done so already, pop over to the original thread now, and vote by liking your favorite of the comments.

Korad: Tomorrow's Ideologies

Last week we asked ourselves which crises threaten the empire’s stability, making room for the new ideologies that will soon arise to threaten the dominant ethos.
According to the new comment-and-like system, they are:

1. Debates between religious scholars erode faith
2. Imminent invasion by long-absent powerful aliens, in clandestine partnership with the scholar-lords of Montvale
3. More men are being born than women, sparking to a patriarchal, atheistic youth protest movement

A new belief system has been born somewhere in the Koradi vastness. Today it is obscure and tiny—much more so than the rapidly growing patriarch movement. Over the next few centuries, the new way will rise, persevere through a period of tumultuous struggle, and in the end eclipse the old order. Over the course of this transformation, it will change in response to the tests it faces. It is not the only nascent ideology. Two other competing belief systems will rise alongside it, challenge its hold over the people, but ultimately fall by the wayside.

This week we'll define those three nascent belief systems. Propose your idea for a new belief system using the comment system below.

To add a new answer to the question, start a new main comment thread.

To add a modifying riff or detail to someone else’s answer, append a reply comment.

Show your approval for an idea by liking the comment in question. Like as many comments as you want.

The original author of any main idea can count a riff on his or her idea as part of the main idea by saying so in a reply to the modification. If the original author does not make this approval, it is incorporated anyway, when the number of likes on a modification equals half or more of the number of likes on the main idea.

Korad: An Empire in Crisis

Last week’s poll in our Korad world-building exercise told us about the province of Palth. The following entry now goes into the Korad bible:

Nomadic pastoralist yak-herders, the Palthians make winter camp at Bridlepost. Something destroys all other communities that get "too big". They just disappear. Palthians are an ornery bunch who just plain don't like being crowded. Palthians believe weather at one's birth mystically affects one's personality and character. Youth go on vision quests/rites of passage in the mountains. In Palth, orphaned children disappear within a fortnight, without exception.

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That completes our survey of Korad’s regions. Now it’s time to activate its core conflicts, as it becomes a place of contending ideologies.

In order for new ideologies to arise, the old one has to show strains severe enough to grant them purchase. As you'll recall, the prevailing culture is austere, militaristic, reverent of knowledge, and covertly matriarchal. The supreme Koradi deity is the Black Goat of the Fens (whom is symbolized by the sacred goat of the marriage ceremony), a million-teated, ever-pregnant creator who spews out fragments of the cosmos, which given enactment and form by her soldier-demiurges. Her great holiday is the Festival of Ideas.

The crucial social unit is the guild, which connects family and empire. An honorable Koradi remains ever willing to spy and steal.

For more detail, review the above-linked setting Bible.

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What now threatens the empire? Answer (and vote on the answers in real time) using the comment system below.

Okay, there are new rules coming up. You’re gamers; you can figure out and follow rules.

This system will speed the last stages of the now-overlong worldbuilding exercise, by folding the pitching and polling steps into one post.

To add a new answer to the question, start a new main comment thread.

To add a modifying riff or detail to someone else’s answer, append a reply comment.

Show your approval for an idea by liking the comment in question. Like as many comments as you want.

The original author of any main idea can count a riff on his or her idea as part of the main idea by saying so in a reply to the modification. If the original author does not make this approval, it is incorporated anyway, when the number of likes on a modification equals half or more of the number of likes on the main idea.

The three ideas with the greatest number of likes will be chosen as the primary causes of instability in the empire, to which the new ideologies must respond.

And… go!

Korad: Voting Palth

For the last year or so I’ve been running an exercise in group world-building as a regular feature on the blog. We’ve now defined all but one of the regions of a fantasy empire called Korad.

Although this newly adopted Blogspot platform outshines LiveJournal in almost every way, its poll feature does lack versatility compared to LJ’s. So please hop on over to the former mothership one last time to vote on the defining traits of the final province, the arid and depopulated land of Palth.