Alternate Worlds Lexicon

[jeregenest]

“Most shadow history proceeds with the logic of dream, full of odd echoes and distorted resonances of our world,” I said. “I am experimenting with anew form, in which a single point of divergence in history leads to anew causal chain of events, and thus a different present.”

“But the world isa dream,” he said excitedly. “Your idea smacks of Democritan materialism — as if the events of the world were produced purely by liner cause and effect, the simplest of the Five Forms of causality.”

“Indeed,” I said.

“How fanciful!” he cried.

    Benjamin Rosenbaum, “Biographical Notes to ‘A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes’ by Benjamin Rosenbaum,” All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, November 2004

So, I made reference to an Alternate Worlds lexicon to shiffer and now I feel like I should explore the idea more.

I think the biggest challenge of an alternate world lexicon is making sure the cross references don't either start focusing on one world (or family of worlds) or on meta-concepts. Lexicons tend to fill the later rounds out fairly quickly with phantoms and you'll want a good chunk of those phantoms to be alternate earths, because frankly thats were the fun is. So you'd have to set it up within the social contract that phantom should be alternate earths. You might want to go even further and give a nomenclature for earths, so example borrowing from Infinite Worlds, Caliph-1 or Merlin-8. The inter-connectiveness of Lexicon would lend itself to a high level of cross-world interaction (which may make the form of cross-time organizations/conspiracies) which would be quite interesting and probably further the purpose of the Lexicon.

The next question that comes to mind is organization. A typical letter organization could work (phone-pad or otherwise) but you wouldn't see many corollaries (if you have Caliph 8 chances of seeing Caliph 12 is very slim). The other option that springs to mind is to divide the game into 10 (or so) dividing points. So the first round its all about games that divided pre-History. The second round bronze age. The third 1300 BC to 500 BC, probably the next till 1 AD, then till maybe 800, than 1500, then once a century thereafter? Who knows can break it up like a billion different ways. Anyway your going to do it is arbitrary but that arbitrarinesses will shape the course of the Lexicon. Another option is by region. These alternate histories all diverge because of something that happened in Africa, these Asia, these Europe, etc.

Well its stuff to ponder.

Comments

[neelk]

One thing you can do is invert the order of the world names, so that Caliph-8 becomes 8-Caliph, and then alphabetize numbers phone pad style. So 1 goes in the ABC round, 2 goes in the DEF round, and so on.

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

I think, especially if you're going with crosstime conspiracies, that an AH lexicon will wind up with an organic teleology to the setting that going forward in breakpoint-time will help evoke.

[shiffer.livejournal.com]

There's two issues to address here, really.

The first is fundamental - is the lexicon just about alternate worlds or is it about an alternate world setting? I happen to think that the latter is more interesting. You've still got the wacky alternate histories and all things associated, but you've also got the characters, organizations and events that tie them together.

The second is, indeed, how to organize it. I think that a hard and fast rule about "at least half the phantoms in every round have to be worlds" could work just fine. The corollaries problem could be solved with some imagination - if we already have Caliph-8 and I suddenly got another idea for something of it's family I'll just have to write Sultanate-4 or something. In the same way that you have to wreck your brain for a title in any other lexicon, you can just do it here. No need to save everyone work just by letting them use numericals.

The idea of dividing the game into divegence points by turns is interesting, but it reads to me as too stiff. What if I only got the awesome idea for a world where monotheism never took hold on the 7th turn? Then I'm just stuck not writing it at all, and I think that's kind of a shame. Dividing by region is pretty much the same.

Though I suppose you could have guidelines that aren't binding. "On this turn we try to focus on divergences between 1500 and 1650. If you need ideas, that's where you should go dig". Still not sure it's a good idea, though.

Stuff to ponder indeed.

[my-tallest.livejournal.com]

You should just use the original classification scheme for the worlds in Infinite Worlds, and use the colors of a Crayola box. It'd be interesting to see someone else's take on Red, Black, and Periwinkle. The crayola box also sticks more to shiffer's point that the worlds setting is more interesting. The set number of colors keeps folks from branching off any number of numeric corollaries to keep from playing in other people's worlds. But you can still get closely themed worlds by color nearness/shades. And you can pick your size of worlds by picking the size of Crayola crayon box (8, 16, 48, 64, etc.). Heck, it's just fun having the conversation on the side about what different colors should mean. Reality Gold? Reality Magenta?

Also, you win the award for most immediately useful link presented to me this month. Why wasn't a copy of All Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories put in my hands months ago by my so-called friends? My money went immediately into their hands.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

I might have to come out of Lexicon-retirement for this one...

One vote here for the idea of organizing by breakpoint rather than alphabet, for the teleological reasons princeofcairo suggests, and also just as an experiment to see how it might alter the lexicon format. Consider for instance that this would effectively mean that the person seeding the name of an alt-history as a phantom - not the person who ultimately writes the entry for that alt-history - will be the one who decides roughly when it diverges. Because they'll need to place it on the appropriate page of the Lexicon wiki. Only play will reveal if this is a bug or a feature.

One drawback with the Caliph-8, Alexander-3 nomenclature (one of very few things I don't love about Infinite Worlds) is that it can encourage you to think of each alt-history in terms of just one major way it diverges - so you might get a lot of "one trait worlds". But for a Lexicon this might be OK - You certainly want evocative names for the alt-earths (not just Earth-1026 etc.), since those names will so often be used as phantom referents.

If we go with Crayola colors, I know they renamed the crayon but I call dibs on Earth-Flesh!

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Another possibility: organize by breakpoint, but go chronologically BACKWARDS - so we do 20th C breakpoints first, then 19th C, etc. This way the worlds will get weirder and more distant from our own as we go.

[mgrasso.livejournal.com]

I like this.

[that-cad.livejournal.com]

Stop being so brilliant. Honestly, you make the rest of us look bad.

[shiffer.livejournal.com]

If we're going by break point, this is definitely the way to go. In which case I imagine the first turn would be the last 100 years or so, and the last one would be 4000 BC and backwards (I don't see a point in doing a turn that is solely prehistoric divergences, but others may disagree).

The problem is that even going in this order we're still lacking for a way to tie them together if all the entries are worlds. At least some would have to be organizations, plots and characters.

Wait. Could we write about all these things in phantoms describing worlds?

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Thats the goal. Any interlinking would come out of the world entries. There woul never be an entry for some world hopping organization, the would only become obvious through the entire Lexicon.

[shiffer.livejournal.com]

Yes, but even so that would lead to a lot of meta-entries, that would be linked to a lot but would never be directly written. And too many meta-entries could be a problem, as past lexicons have showed.

You could just not wikiword them, I guess, but that would just be silly and would solve nothing.

Ideas?

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

No meta entries. Strict adherence that the idea that only words wikiworded are other entries and only worlds may be entries. I think this actually takes care of the reference too many articles problem we've seen on most lexicons.

[shiffer.livejournal.com]

Hmm.

Well, I forsee difficulty, but would definitely up to giving it my best shot!

[vaklam.livejournal.com]

I am all for the worlds-only restriction on entries. There's still a great deal of latitude within that but it would act as a focus like a poetical structure.

There doesn't have to be a formal naming convention. There could be several organizations involved in naming the alternate worlds. "The philistines in the All Worlds League call it Earth-Epsilon but we know it as Vatican Prime."

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

I think the avoiding naming convention especially works if we do a break-point schemata.