The status of my white-haired main character has grown a lot! That’s because I roll dice every Sunday morning. It also makes for very fast writing, as it turns out.

Since April 18th, I’ve had fun writing a fiction story. Around the end of April 26 (that would be 8 days later) I reached 50 000 words. It’s slowed down a bit since (65 000 by the end of the month), which is good because I have other things to do as well. Also to avoid repetitive stress injury from insane amounts of typing, I could not do this all year round. But it is a pretty awesome feeling when the writing just runs through the brain onto the screen.

The fiction is a coming-of-age psychic mini-superhero story using dice. The scope is similar to that of Smallville (the TV and book series) in that it follows a boy with unusual abilities from he discovers them until he is fully grown. But the tone is very different. The powers are different, and they start out very weak, so much so that at first they are indistinguishable from coincidence. There are also no truly superpowered enemies or allies – for the duration of this story at least, it is assumed that the Main Character is the only of his kind on Earth.

(There may be sequels, or maybe not. The story as first draft is extremely bare-bones and I might easily expand it not only by adding detail but also by writing scenes in between existing scenes. In the hands of a better writer, this story could easily be as long as Smallville. Then again, in the hands of a better writer, Smallville might have been worth watching more than halfway through.)

(When I say these 65 000 words are “bare-bones”, I mean as in “we only know the hair and eye color of the main character and his best friend”, “we don’t know the layout of any buildings”, “we don’t know the local plant life but the setting is said to be in northern Europe” (it is actually in Denmark, to the best of my knowledge, with a brief vacation in southern Norway which is mentioned in one of the first chapters.) It is the complete antithesis of filler. Pretty much all except the action and dialog is left to imagination, at least as of today.)

***

Now about the dice. The psychic powers are very closely based on GURPS third edition, the Psionics chapter with a little extra detail from the Psionics extended rulebook. This is a robust, realistically scaling role playing system that lets you transition seamlessly from the everyday to the fantastical given enough time. In my case, I roll the dice every Sunday morning (story time, not my time!) and increase one stat each time.

For those who want to try this approach but not for psychic powers, they may want a different time scale and a different skill set. But I particularly like psionics, so.

At the start of the story, as the Main Character enters high school, he is noticeably weaker, slower, clumsier and (barely noticeably) stupider than the rest of his class. The only stat that is above average is Longevity, which is one I added as a vital stat, which it is not in GURPS. (In GURPS there is a life extension subpower of healing, I am skipping that in return.) Because longevity has already kicked in, the character is aging more slowly than his classmates, so that at the onset of high school he is only just past puberty. This delay explains most of his weakness, which also makes him a victim of relentless bullying ever since his childhood.

Each Sunday morning (story time) I roll 1 ordinary 6-sided die first to determine the type of stat to increase. In my setup, there are two groups of psionic powers plus vital stats. The first group is variations of telekinesis and telepathy. The second group is miscellaneous psychic powers such as teleportation, ESP and healing. Each of these have a power component (the strength of the psychic power) and a skill component (the chance of success and level of precision, if applicable). The eyes of the die translate as follows:
1 = basic psychic power group
2 = misc psychic power group
3 = vital stat
4 = basic psychic skill group
5 = misc psychic skill group
6 = vital stat up to 15, after that reroll

After determining the group, a new single-die roll determines the exact power or stat to increase by 1. For example: Roll 1 = 2, which means we will increase the raw strength of a miscellaneous psychic power. Roll 2 = 6, which takes us to the specific power of healing. (As it happens, in the actual story this power got a higher than average number of rolls throughout the story, to the point where I tried to vary the way I threw my dice, including using two different dice for the two rolls, but the phenomenon continued. Make of that what you will.)

As for skills, they start at IQ-3. This is not really useful information unless you know GURPS. But it means that when the vital stat of Intelligence rises, the skill stats increase along with it but the power level does not – only the chance of success and degree of control.  So with starting INT= 9 (IQ 90) an accumulated skill roll of 1 would give an actual skill of 6, or a chance of success of 9.3%. For the first chapters, I added a beginner’s luck to the narrative to introduce some of the powers into the story, but then the Main Character naturally finds that it is almost impossible to make it happen again until months later when his skill has improved again. His powers start out almost useless and stay that way for his first year in school, where he continues to be bullied mercilessly but increasingly often get premonitions that warn him, or miraculously escapes before getting too badly beaten up. At this point he has really no offensive or defensive powers beyond running away.

The dice only determine what is possible, they do not decide the story as such. But they do push on it. Due to the early and relatively rapid growth of his healing and telepathy, it was natural to develop him into more of a healer type. Certainly his mother  sees him as such. As a result, at the end of high school he decides to become a nurse, and after a year changes studies to doctor (physician) as his intelligence continues to increase. This means that for the most part, detective or combat abilities are downplayed even when his powers reach a level where such a role would become possible. If the dice had caused a rapid increase in strength and telekinesis early on, he might have become a more classical combat-oriented hero.

***

Obviously this approach will not work for all genres, but perhaps it can help someone else escape from writer’s block. There are also many other ways in which dice can be used for fiction. In my Sims 2 blog, for instance, my simulated neighborhood Micropolis was exposed to random events from year 40 onward, such as climate change or the outbreak of a genetically modified disease. I had a list of possible events and used dice to determine which of them actually happened, if any, and in which order. I hope this can give blocked writers some new ideas. Good luck!

Right now, writing stories is fun! I love writing books about Books of the Truth. ^_^

I wrote earlier in the month about my “winning” NaNoWriMo – it is not actually a competition except with ourselves and with time, admittedly worthy adversaries – and how my victory felt hollow because I had taken to heart the National Novel Writing Month’s slogan of “quantity over quality”. It is not like I was writing gibberish or random sentences, but my 50 000 words were basically an exploration of wish fulfillment and the price thereof. It was, I now think, aiming downward, digging into a lower world. My favorite writing goes in the opposite direction: Aiming upward, toward higher goals, higher worlds that humble and amaze those who are found worthy to see them. But of course that is hard to write.

Even so, after a few days of well deserved rest, I started on a second story which was more satisfying. It may even grow to something publishable one day if I get to live.

***

The basic worldbuilding is actually one I have used before: Parallel to the mundane world (to several mundane worlds, actually) lies a magical world dominated by wizards. They are not the formal rulers of the realm; there are kings for that. But they rule by majesty and lead through awe, for their power is not inherited by blood nor is it bestowed by ritual, but is the power of wisdom won by learning the Truth. They are Hermetic mages, although that name would not be familiar in their world. When a teenager has read a thousand books in his or her lifetime, the Wizard Guild will know, and a representative is sent to induct them into the knowledge of the Truth. They are given access to the hidden libraries that contain the 20 000 Books of Truth, also called the Books of Thoth  (or Thothe in the local language, which is more fond of vowels than ours.)

Thothe was the legendary divine king of Atalan. In his lifetime he achieved all knowledge, insight and wisdom that one can bear and still remain in a human body. He invented a new and better system of writing, and wrote his wisdom down in the legendary 20 000 Books of Truth. After giving his books to the world, Thothe laid off his human body and ascended to the heights of the spirit world, but before this he  promised to return in the world’s greatest hour of need to save human civilization once again. It is said that whoever reads and understands all the Books of Truth will be the reincarnation of Thothe.

Reading 20 000 heavy tomes of concentrated wisdom seems too much for a single lifetime, but this is where the Gift of Thothe comes in. Each of the Books gives a magical ability to those who have read it, and the first book, named simply the Book of Truth, bestows upon its reader the Gift of Thothe, that every moment spent reading the Truth, thinking of the Truth, meditating on the Truth, practicing the Truth and dreaming of the Truth will not age their physical body. Therefore, wizards who are ardent in their pursuit of the Truth can live for hundreds of years. They can become immensely powerful, to the point where the people of their world refers to them as gods (roughly translated – it is known by all that they are not the Creator, but they are thought to be His servants and representatives.) But there is yet another limit.

Thothe describes the Truth as a tree whose root is in Heaven and its branches here below. Its trunk is one, but in order to reach us down here, it has many boughs and branches. After reading the Book of Truth, you can choose one of various branches to follow. Each of the books that represents a main branch can be read directly after you have understood the Book of Truth, while others require you to first read the book that is the “trunk of the branch”, which then opens the way for one or more other books and so on. Some of these branches are open for all wizards. But there are seven pairs of branches that are complementary, and to most they appear opposite. If you have begun to study one of them, the opposite branch will make no sense at all. The words and sentences will be readable, but you will not be able to get the message, because it will seem opposite to the Truth you already know. Only people with a particularly great inner capacity for the Truth will be able to grasp one such pair, and any who does so is sure to be known as a god and nominated to the High Council. Only legendary gods, appearing rarely through history, have been known to learn as many as three of the pairs. And it is said that only Thothe, on his return, will know them all.

Well, Thothe may have to hurry up, for a new challenge is upon the world. But to understand this, we have to return to the mundane worlds, worlds such as our own.

When a teenager in our world has read a thousand books in his or her lifetime, a librarian will give them the 1001st Book, which seems to be a fantasy novel about a young boy who has read a thousand books and gains the ability to spend his dreams in the magical world. It gives some details about this world and the kind of things one may expect there, and also an introduction to the writing system, the Runes of Thothe, which is one in which each rune represents one syllable. They are constructed in a logical way, so that syllables that have a sound in common will also have some features in common. If the teenager goes on to actually learn this syllabic script, they will wake up one night in the Magic World, in a body that is a copy of the one they had in the mundane world. There a wizard or group of wizards will take them under wing and provide for them as they begin to learn the Truth and become a wizard in their own right.

One night in the mundane world corresponds to eight days in the magic world; time flows differently there. The world is very similar to ours (except much of the polar caps have melted and the sea level is about 30 meteres higher) but for some reason the moon is much closer to Earth, with a month lasting only 8 days. (The tides are also higher, obviously.) It is only on the Moonday night, when the moon is new, that a wizard may cross over between the worlds. Normally only the mind crosses over, and the body in the Magic World will age 8 times as fast, if not for the Gift of Thothe. This causes some interesting side effects for the teenagers who, at least until they have fully understood the Book of Truth, will be gradually older in one world than the other. (This plays a role in this year’s story, as the main character’s cousin is a middle school senior in Mundania but two years older in the Magic World. That’s incidentally the same age as the main character, just saying.)

Now, the civilization of Atalan has survived the disastrous flooding that covered its homeland in water nearly 10 000 years ago, 2 000 years after the reign of Thothe. It lives in balance with nature, growing food organically, its population in balance due to the advanced health care provided by the wizards, and high standards of hygiene. Although the civilization is pre-industrial, literacy is universal and people live simple but healthy lives, enjoying good food and cultural activities. Those who do not want to have children (or not have more children) get their fertility turned off by a wizard who has the necessary magical knowledge. Likewise those who want children can have their fertility increased. Various forms of fertility magic are at the core of the Atalan civilization, boosting both agriculture and animal husbandry, as well as voluntarily regulating population.

But lately, civilization is under threat. Someone has introduced steam age industry on the continent west of the ocean (presumably North America), along with ironclad ships and gunpowder. Most likely it is a crossover wizard that has turned against the traditions of his new world and taught them as much of our science as their society was able to duplicate. Traders protected by powerful warships and soldiers have arrived on the coast, forcing the local towns to let them set up their trading bases. From here they have begun flooding the land with cheap mass produced goods, disturbing the delicate balance of society. But this is just the beginning: The invaders are also marketing a different philosophy, one that says that wizardry is just tricks and psychology, that there is no Truth, no gods and no spirit world. The people, they say, are being suppressed by a ruling class of tricksters holding them down in a primitive agrarian society and a sparse population, whereas industry could provide them with unlimited luxuries and fill booming cities with their happy offspring.

While a culture war is taking place on the coasts of Europe, the invading army from the west has already taken control of the British Isles (which are somewhat smaller due to the flooding) and deposed the local kings, killed any wizards they could find, and outlawed religion under threat of capital punishment. The rest of Europe is likely to follow … unless the wizards can hold the invading barbarians off until Thothe returns.

Sounds like something that could become publishable one day, doesn’t it? If I manage to keep my teens reasonably chaste, at least. You know how they can be, it can be hard to make them concentrate on the Truth for long.

“You shouldn’t be embarrassed about writing a novel.” Well, unless it is as bad as mine.

I totally won NaNoWriMo this year. I wrote over 50 000 words of one continuous story. That’s all it takes, and I did it in less than two weeks. Mission accomplished with margin, as we had one month to do it. I am a master of quantity, woo.

The quality was terrible. I think a decent editor would have killed about 90% of it. There was all kind of irrelevant stuff, only one character worth mentioning, very little plot and virtually no drama. It was basically a mix of wish fulfillment and midlife angst. But no one is asking about that on NaNoWriMo.org. Quantity is king. At least I got verified that I still have that. Also I dispensed with some of my signature writing traits, like the long dialogs, often humorous, and barely worksafe humorous references to human sexuality. This year’s story would probably have passed a Republican party convention without any critical remarks, except that it was repetitive and lacked direction.

So yeah, it was an OK practice, but nothing more than that. It is not something that could be salvaged and made into a publishable work without a complete reboot.

I am not sure whether I am going to continue doing NaNoWriMo, even if I live for more years, which I sincerely hope. I feel that I have mastered quantitative writing now. I hope there will never be a time when I need to write for a living. And if there was, I would rather write fact than fiction, these days. There is so much beauty in truth. Just before NaNoWriMo started, I signed up for an edX MOOC about exoplanets. It is somewhat heavy on math, but, exoplanets! Planets around other stars! Alien worlds! Thousands of them! Isn’t that much more interesting that the petty power plays of insignificant humans? Let alone insignificant imaginary humans.

Calling on the Blue magic of Aquarius, the power over water and air! If this doesn’t clean out the sink, I don’t know what will! (Screenshot Sims 3.)

I have been surprisingly relaxed about NaNoWriMo this year. I even started my vacation a week earlier, meaning I will have to be at the office during the last week of November. That was unthinkable before. Well, there are two reasons for that, the most important being that the office will relocate from one somewhat secret location to another, and this strongly suggests my presence. ^_^ The other reason is of course The Sims 3: Into the Future, which came out this past week, the next to last week of October. I just wrote about how ridiculously excited I was about that game, remember? It was actually very enjoyable too. But NaNoWriMo is like a pilgrimage, a holy near-obligation of the writing soul.

With that out of the way, let us look at the worldbuilding for this years novel, as we usually do.

***

The working title is “Hobby mages” and the pre-production blurb is: “High school boys are easily bored, and Andreas is no exception. Having nothing better to do, he joins a game where players use their smartphones to locate ‘magic nodes’ in the real world and harness a magic that is only visible on the screen. It doesn’t hurt that he can watch the girl from his parallel class from behind as she leads them from one location to the next. But what if she is right and this is not just a game? What if a sinister conspiracy has been draining our world of magic for centuries? And what if the only thing that can prevent them from making Earth a barren wasteland forever is a bunch of squabbling, selfish and mostly juvenile gamers?”

Originally the working title was “Ingress of Magic”, because the basic idea was a kind of love child of the outdoors game Ingress and the computer game Master of Magic, both of which have been in my “Top 10 Lifetime Favorites”. If you know them, the rest of the worldbuilding very nearly writes itself. But fear not, I’ll spell it out anyway.

The world in which the story takes place is very similar to our own, although some place names are different and some towns are found in different locations. One notable difference is that smartphones / phablets are called “POC” (or PoC for the purists), meaning both “Pocket Computer” and “Point of Contact”, as they originally included telephone, text messaging and email. The name was coined by founder Gil Bates of MicroSystems Inc, a driving force in personal computing for many years. The new invention did not take off until years later, however, when the charismatic genius Joe Stubs presented the MyPOC, with a larger screen, full Interweb access and an easy-to-use interface. However, today most POCs are powered by the Robo operating system from rival GIIGA, a many-tentacled software company with the curiously pious slogan “Deliver us from evil”. Nobody has quite found out why they picked that. But it is only RoboPOCs which can run the new game, which insists it is not a game, named “Influx”.

The game (or not a game) is so named because it consists of locating and harnessing magic that supposedly flows into our world from four other worlds, each in an alternate dimension, and each magic with a different color and properties.

Celestia is the origin of the White magic of light, knowledge and protection. It mostly leaks into the world from white magic nodes that coincide in our world with places of worship and religiously themed monuments. Small scattered amounts are found around town, presumably where religious people often pass through.

Nurtura is the world from which comes the Green magic of nature, healing and fertility. It is found in small amounts in forests, park and farms, but with particular nodes in forest groves, old large trees and moss-shrouded boulders.

Aquarius is the world of Blue magic, which controls water, air and the mist of illusion. It is scattered on rivers, lakes and the sea, but its nodes are in springs, fountains and where streams or rivers join.

Energaia is the home of Red magic, the magic of raw power, heat and speed. It is associated with fire and scattered around inhabited areas, but nodes are usual power plants, smelting industries and some other factories where intense heat has been employed.

There is yet another world, Exon, which is associated with black magic. Its nodes are typically cemeteries and disaster sites. But this is not a magic that flows into our world – rather, black magic is a twisting of the four other magics and of life itself into a different force, which is then drawn into Exon, a vampiric world or black hole of magic. While using the other four colors of magic increases their presence in our world, the use of black magic reduces all forms of magic and eventually, once they are drained, life itself.

One drawback to the four “bright” magics is that the nodes can only be unlocked by a pair, two players being present together and performing certain actions in sync. After a node is unlocked, the same pair of players will need to revisit it – not necessarily together, but within 12 hours of each other in either direction – in order for the magic to flow freely. Black magic can be unlocked and drawn by a single player, as it is fundamentally different.

When a gate is locked, there is only a tiny trickle of magic. Once it is unlocked, the influx of magic quickly increases to its maximum. A pool of magic gradually forms around the node, although this is only visible on the screen of the POC, which serves as a combined map, grimoire and talisman. The pool is “full” after about 4 hours, but you can absorb it into your talisman at any point, resetting it to empty. If a pool is left full for a full week, the magic flow will begin to dwindle, and after another week the node is locked again.

To further complicate things, a pair of mages can only unlock and maintain one color of magic. This can only be reset by an elaborate procedure performed by the Head Mages which administer the e-grimoires. When reset, they lose all connection to their previous color.

Other mages of the same color can poach on each other’s nodes, as they are supposed to be allies. It is not necessarily welcome, though. It is also possible to drain the pools of other colors, but this is considered very bad form without permission, as you only receive 1/4 of the magic charge due to loss during conversion. Black mages also receive 1/4 charge, but bright mages visiting a Black site will lose charge, another oddity tilting the player field in favor of the Black.

Invisible lines connect all magic nodes in the world, known and unknown, to others of the same color. These so-called Ley lines are the only known way to increase the output from nodes above the usual 1-week maximum. A ritual is required to activate a Ley line: A pair of mages on each end must perform the ritual simultaneously, or very nearly so. It is a matter of seconds rather than minutes, so that it is impossible for the same pair to run over and perform the ritual at the other end. You need friends to work with you. The result causes a small amount of magic to leak out along the entire line, which can be harvested in a pinch. More importantly, it doubles the output of each node, including the size of its magic pool. You can even triple the output by connecting a third node, and so on. This is however rare, because a line of one color cannot cross a line of another color.

Because magic is so weak now, the effects of spells on the physical world are very subtle and indirect. Users of White magic may gradually become smarter, luckier and with sharper senses. Users of Red magic may become stronger and faster. Users of Green magic may become healthier and sexier, although our main character would not have any problems with that for quite a while! Yes, I intend to make Andreas and Malin (his magic-only partner) Green mages, with all the potential for misunderstanding that follows from this.

So yeah, that’s pretty much the worldbuilding. I intend to explain the basic principles during discussions early in the story, so they don’t appear as Deus Ex Machina later when we run into them in practice. Maybe not every detail: Magic should be somewhat mysterious and subjective, otherwise it would be science, right? ^_^