NaBloPoMo #1 – Introduction / The Rivers

So once again, I’m sitting around watching the rush into NaNoWriMo, and once again, I’m taking on the (rather easy in comparison) challenge of it’s sister; NaBloPoMo, and trying to post once a day for this month.  And once again, it’s probably going to mostly be about Broken, ’cause it makes good blogging fodder.  And because I don’t exactly have the most interesting of lives  Although anything that comes of the painting should find itself up here too.

Anyway, on with the show.  I’m going to try and keep things a bit more consistent this time; I’m going to try to work through my world-building in a bit less of a slapdash way to last November; hopefully this will be useful for both myself, and anyone who’s interested.  I may also try to fill in some semi-mechanical details; give you an idea of how these aspects of the world would be represented in the rules.

 

The Rivers

The starting point for any real discussion of Broken has to be the Rivers.  They aren’t physical streams, but flows of supernatural (from our point of view, that is) energy, that exist in a place that isn’t quite in the material world, but close enough to influence it in a very fundemental way.  Of course, from the point of view of the inhabitants of Broken, this is very much the normal state of affairs.  What’s rather less well-known is that the material world itself is but another River; Khet, the great River of Void, and all things result from the ways in which the other Rivers manifest within the Void.  Stone, for example, is the manifestation of the River of Stone, and strong winds blow wherever the River of Storms grows close to the material world within the Void.

These Rivers are not just abstract flows of energy; most contain entire Otherworlds within them; smaller reflections of the world within the Void, and likewise touched by other, foreign flows.  Plants and creatures grow here too, some familiar, some totally alien; and there are many species and tribes who were once inhabitants of an Otherworld, exiled or lost and left to live within the Void itself.

As the energy of the Rivers flows into the Void and the Otherworlds, it forms patterns of woven flows, and it is from these that the physical world springs.  And so Patterns will be the focus of tomorrow’s update…

 

Whys and Wherefores

The Rivers were one of the first bits of Broken I really figured out; a bit of Stephen Erikson’s Warrens, a bit of the Death-as-a-river analogy from Garth Nix’s books.  From just a magic system they’ve grown to be the very fundemental science behind the setting.  Riverworking; shaping the energy of the Rivers into physical effect is as much technology as conventional magic, and the reverse holds true in Broken – my slightly stubborn attempt to get away from the Magic vs. Technology duality in a lot of fantasy settings.

 

Mechanics

Really, the Rivers underly the entirity of the rules.  ’Realms’ – Broken’s stat-equivalent are Rivers, and vary with the species and special characteristics of a PC or NPC (Humans having Blood, Breath and Bone).  Likewise, sorcerers can tap into raw River energy, Namers invoke and weave Patterns, Shapers tap into the macropattern of the world around, and Tuners tinker with the Pattern that makes up their own physical form.  Not much more I can go into at the moment, as it’s pretty fundemental to the setting.

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