The Gaming Den

So I was reading FerretBrain after it was linked regarding Harry Potter when I saw this article about genre and how to a large extent it is bullshit when I read:

Daniel Hemmens wrote:If I write a novel in which a wizard falls in love with a robot while solving a murder on an airship, a murder which turns out to have been committed by a werewolf who is slowly hunting down all the passengers, and who might be controlled by a sinister corporate conspiracy, then not only have I written the most awesome novel ever but I’ve also produced something that could equally well be classified as fantasy, romance, science fiction, steampunk, crime fiction, horror or thriller.

So, I decided to try and write this. Mostly for practice, but I was planning on emailing it to Daniel Hemmens and possibly putting it up on this forum if people are interested.

Now I don't think I'll be able to do a whole novel (let alone that the plot can't be spread out that far) so its likely to be a relatively short serialised novella of maybe around 20-30,00 words, similar to how classics like Oliver Twist or Great Expectations were written. And the writing isn't going to be great. As in, the working title is "The Mystery of the Disappearing Dogs on the Dirigible".

However, I need to come up with an accessible setting which involves airships, magic, robots, werewolves and conspiracies. Thankfully it is written fiction and not a game setting so it can't be broken by one of the PCs doing something stupid, but it still needs to feel right.

My instinct is to make it alternative history with a relatively recent divergence. So, this is what I have, in terms of a rough series of events leading up to the story. Does this make enough sense to feel right for the time?

Airships:
I'm thinking that this requires it to be early this century, but to have widespread use the airship technology needs to be brought forward more. The best excuse for this is that airships were of more use in the first world war (the Great War) and so are a lot better than in our history. So, for the story it needs to be in peace time, shortly after the great war- 1920 or so. As an aside I was going to make the Treaty of Versailles less harsh so that there is the possibility of not having the Second World War, or at least not so bad.

Robots:
This needs female robots for the love interest- while I could add another genre of LGBT or whatever by having a "homosexual" relationship (to the extent it can be when one is a robot) it fits better with the stereotypical romance genre by being a man and a "woman". However, it doesn't really need a detailed explanation of how robots work.

• Women worked as computers, doing the actual computing of numbers. A lot more so than men because they were paid less and so it was cheaper. (The first professional programmers were women, you have examples like Pickering's Harem, etc) I'm exaggerating the degree for the alternative history of course.
• Mechanical Computers were invented in the 1850s, probably heavily including Ada King, Countess of Lovelace.
• Women were the first programmers because they were already computers and knew how to convert what they do to the mechanical computers. Probably together with pressure from Countess Ada King.
• Robots invented at some point. Maybe 1880s? Because they worked with women and were controlled by women they were made in the shape of women. As in, rampant sexism meant that you couldn't have women in charge of "men" and that the prudish public meant that you couldn't have "men" and women working closely together for fear of shenanigans.
• As a requirement for the romance subplot, the robots can't be asexual. So, the female robots have genitals so that they can be treated for hysteria (no matter that they don't have wombs) and have the ability to have "hysterical paroxysms" (orgasms). The method for creating robot intelligences with the possible pleasurable feelings creates the possibility for sexual desire and relationships.
• The Great War is started, and to work in the freezing cold, thin air on the outside of airships robots are needed urgently. The existing female robots are drafted. Once again, due to sexism the rest of the crew have to be female, and the possible ranks first proposed for the RAF are used to differentiate them from the male army and navy (Reeve, Banneret, Ardian etc). Robots are never allowed to be officers, and there have to be an equal number of promoted humans as robots.

(The great war and women being pilots is partly so that it has some radically different gender roles from history, just for the sake of it, and so that the female characters can have strong personalities, goals and abilities. It could also work fine with the female robot being a generic mechanical computer and a passenger, but its already a hugely sexist time period so why not shake it up a bit and be less sexist as a setting, rather than the one or two women being the sole strong female characters within the setting)

Magic:
With a recently divergent alternate history, there were several things that magic could have come from- Aleister Crowley, Lily Dale and Theosophy (thanks Josh) to name a few. However, while mysticism is more fitting with the era I'd prefer to have magic more obvious and less mystical.
So, an event that caught the popular eye is the Cottingley Fairies. Unfortunately, that was 10 years too late. So, here are some random thoughts:

• Move the Cottingley Fairies 10 years earlier, and have Sir Arthur Conan Doyle find out much earlier and manage to capture one.
• While Sir Doyle tries to spread the word, some wizards come out of hiding to try to stop the publicity and accidentally get caught up in it.
• Due to the public uproar and fear of magic the known wizards, and a few more, publicly swear a magical direct oath of loyalty to King George V, who was just recently coronated. They become the first Wizard-at-Arms.
• The first Wizard Collegium is started. All graduating wizards are made to swear an oath to the King and become Wizard-at-Arms. The main protagonist is one of these graduates.

Once again the setting doesn't really need a detailed explanation of how magic works. However I need something for fairies to be or do that doesn't really affect anything and isn't some secret conspiracy behind everything.

Werewolves:
Not a clue. To be honest, I don't really care either, since the fact that the murderer is a werewolf starts off a mystery and it doesn't need a description and explanation. I'm not going to have the murderer giving a monologue explaining where werewolves come from and their society. As long as I don't start talking about dog-fucking it should be fine.

Corporate Conspiracy:
Because of things like this game and discussion of the topic, I thought about a parallel to the opium trade in china. So, heres the rough events again.

• Early on in America's independence the East India Trading Company stopped trading coffee and tea to America. Whether because of the Boston Tea Party or what doesn't matter, but the hot drink of choice is hot chocolate.
• During the Great War, American soldiers brought across with them lots of hot chocolate and used some of it as gifts etc in England. Because of this, a huge craze for hot chocolate sprang up in England, and the East India Trading Company started trading for chocolate in America.
• However, chocolate prices started going up and people on the streets started getting angry with EITC. To get chocolate at a reasonable price the EITC decided to repeat their tactic in China.
• The EITC joined together with some Spanish company/royals to grow coca in South America and make cocaine from it. Then, trade it with the Americans for gold, and use that gold to buy hot chocolate from cocoa beans (coca and cocoa are different plants).
• The sinister corporate conspiracy is to keep the cocaine trade going by... um... killing Prince George (our history's King George VI) who is currently in negotiations with America to use the Royal Navy and Royal Flying Corps to stop the trade of cocaine.

The reason for the murderer being on the airship is pretty poor, but I think the conspiracy itself is pretty cool, being an interesting idea of hot chocolate being worth more than cocaine and the fact that something similar actually happened.

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So, what do you think of this as a base for an alternative history setting which has wizards, robots, airships, werewolves and corporate conspiracies? Where does it break down and how can it be improved? Would anyone be willing to give it a quick look over in a week or two (or more, if I find myself unable to actually write) to give it an amateur edit?

1. Women as pilots is a notable point in Heinlein's Starship Troopers - the book anyways. He justifies it with some psuedoscience about statistical performances that says starships piloted by females have a higher wartime survival rate. I can't recall if it was due to gender differences in perception/reflexes or due to gender differences in risk assessment. But you could go with something like this to reinforce the "women as pilots" bit.

2. Spiritualism is older than those faeries, as is Blavatsky. either or both seem to fit into a WWI timeline far enough back for the public emergence of mysticism to be only a generation or so old.

In Starship troopers it's a multiple reasons:

1) Women do 3d math better in their heads then men
2) Women are more cool under pressure
3) When you're being shot out of a ship in what amounts to a bullet, its nice to have a female voice be the last thing you hear.

While mysticism fits the Victorian era better and gives some time before the story for magic to spread, it is harder to say that someone who is involved in mysticism is a wizard. I'd prefer the magic to be more obviously magic than mysticism. I'll edit that part a bit to make it more obvious.

I prefer the Cottingley Fairies for two reasons:

• Its relatively widely known even today, involving Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and has photographs of the involved people.
• Its a lot, lot simpler to explain that fairies and wizards were exposed during this one event than to explain the belief system behind Lily Dale or Theosophy and how it relates to magic. As well as the fact that using Lily Dale or similar sets the setting as a monotheistic world in truth and I'd rather keep away from religion as much as possible.

Thinking about it, I could have used Aleister Crowley or people around him. Except that:

• Crowley's magic involves a lot of drug use. While at the time drugs were more widely used (see Sherlock Holmes regularly going to opium dens) I'd rather not have the protagonist a recreational drug user.
• How does sex magic interact with robots?
• It means condoning the racism, sexism and drug use, as well as the sex cults.
• In all the books etc involving Crowley I've seen he is portrayed as a villain. This means either going with it and having Crowley (who would be in Sicily at the time) being an antagonist and the main character being an anti-hero, or explaining that Crowley wasn't actually evil and portraying him in a good light. I'd rather not have an anti-hero and going against popular culture needs a really good reason to bother when there are other alternatives.

I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that I have to explain robots, wizards and airships, set up a conspiracy, develop the characters and so on, and there just isn't space to have an exposition conversation about theosophy or the like, especially in a serialised form where you may only be reading a chapter at a time.

I'll probably take the idea of Crowley as an anti-hero for my own "Heartbreaker: Earth" setting.

I'll probably cast him as.... a Cambion, Electro (Cerebro)-mancer, with followers of some sort.

It means condoning the racism, sexism and drug use, as well as the sex cults.

Not necessarily condoning.

Remember that if you're writing (among other things) a mystery, it can be useful to give suspects reasons to lie that aren't related to the murder at hand. Maybe a suspect doesn't have a alibi because they didn't want to tell the police "Officer, I wasn't at the crime scene because at that time I was participating in ritual sex magik as a member of an underground cult". Maybe friends of the murder victim aren't revealing the victim's laudanum abuse for fear of coming under investigation for possession of an illegal substance themselves - even though the laudanum trade provides a possible motive for the killing.

Magical societies were incredibly common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Masons, Rosicrucians, Theosophy, and many more. You really could take your damn pick. Or fuck, you could just make up your own magic system. My personal suggestion would be to throw down some incredibly simple rules so that people can follow this shit. Simple elemental wheels are good for that, because people can understand them.

If you're going to have art deco female robots from the early 20th century, I suggest relying heavily on the work of Fritz Lang. Because you need more robot whore-saboteurs in your life.

Traditionally, all artificial intelligences that are made either want to kill or fuck their creator, with bonus points for wanting to do both. You'll want the robot temptress to have been made by the wizard's now-dead brother.

-Username17

I love this idea, and can't wait to see more of this. I do second Frank's notion that with all the crazy mysticism you can create a new school piecemeal from all the exciting sources that exist from that period.

As far as design for your fembots, I've always thought that Tamara Lempicka's ladies looked like they might be androids...