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beccaelizabethI've been vaguely designing my city according to magical medieval city guide for a bunch of weeks now. Is fun, but it ends up with some numbers I don't agree with. Like, at the moment, my city has 377 taverns, 110 inns, and 9 restaurants. In a city of 8K people. Even medieval Norwich, at around 10K, had only a pub for every day. That's like 120 extra pubs there. Norwich also managed a church for every Sunday. That's one of the highest church densities around, apparently. So when my MMC numbers reckon there's 117 religious buildings, something needs tweaking. Especially since I didn't actually want churches. Wanted secular, like Star Trek, only with magic and zombies. Because zombies are going to push a society one of two ways, religiously, and this one decided as the dominant that zombies meant every religion ever was wrong, and there's just meat. So a few of those religious buildings are secret religious cults, who went hyper religious instead, but I have to decide what to do with the other 110.
Outside the walls there are 16 buildings, and they belong to the Rangers. Most of the warrior types in the city are either caravan guards or city guards. They basically hope zombies stay away, and if they turn up they'll just try hitting them or burning them until they stop moving. Rangers are zombie specialists. They make it their business to try and learn all about them. Which means they get looked at sideways as potential necromancers, but they also have the best chance of surviving zombie infested areas. They know the formula for Final Rest potion, which stops a body ever rising again, and they own the Alchemist's lab, which is also outside the walls and more than 100 yards from the nearest other people because sometimes it goes boom. They also go out and collect the dead and make sure they're at Final Rest. This is the kind of task that's going to probably take the rest of forever, hence being vaguely like religion. To them it's science. There's a finite number of dead people. There's a relatively small finite number of dead people that are lying around in the kind of places zombies rise from. Taking small numbers out of finite numbers will work eventually. So they go out and collect up bones after a Rising, or sometimes mount dangerous expeditions to old centres of habitation, to do what they can for the generations still under. And while they go out, they also go looking for those who use zombies. Doctrine says they do this so they can stop the bastards. Rumour says they do it so it can be their turn next.
Rangers know secrets. Some of them are about zombie creation. Some of them are about other results of zombies. Everyone knows about Risings, when the mindless dead get called from the earth and set out implacably to get as many people to join them as they can reach. What very few know is that sometimes, when someone survives a Rising, they get more out of it than new scars. Usually, if a zombie gets close enough to bite you or bleed on you, you're going to get torn to pieces or otherwise killed. You then rise as one of the mindless. But sometimes, instead, you escape, with terrible wounds. Then there's a chance of becoming infected. The infection is a bad one, not amenable to most healing potions. Sometimes healing potions actually make it worse, leaving wounds gaping open that had closed already. Body temperature climbs to high fever, and then plummets to hypothermic levels. Most people die. And when they die, if they don't get Final Rest immediately, they rise again. Usually as mindless things like those that attacked them. Sometimes as something with echoes of the deceased. Those ones are hardest, to know they're just as dangerous should they start to fight, but to see more of the lost one in them. There's a lot of rumours about what the Rangers do with such lost ones. Doctrine says it involves Final Rest, and the pyre. But Rangers are only human.
Most of them.
There are a few who get infected and live through it. And some of those, when they die, stay down. But the rest? Rumour and legend has it there's a few, a very few, who just won't die for long. They get cold, in more ways than one, but they stay basically themselves, and they keep moving, steady and untiring now. When a very old soldier seems particularly well preserved, there's always rumours about them. They're scarred and cold and just don't seem to care enough. Are they sure that they're still living?
(The science-tech justification is that the out of control nanotech that raises zombies does so in response to wounds, since it was intended as healing. Like the Black Spot thing in the one with Amy being a pirate. But it has stupidly bad ideas of what constitutes a healthy human being, so it just makes dumb zombies with insufficient brain for a personality, and physically unstable ones at that, and they just grab and fight and be a problem. If someone gets infected, initially the zombie nanotech tries to 'heal' them but fights with their own immune system, and possibly with healing potions if they're a relevant sort. So it can zombie heal wounds, and healing potions reopen them to heal them in a more thorough and permanent way. But if the zombie nano wins, the shonky healing gets applied all over, and they're basically zombies with slightly fresher brains. However if the immune system wins the shonky zombie nano can stick around long enough to learn how this system functions when healthy. That means it can, sometimes, rarely, end up working actually as intended, and make someone kind of sort of immortal with a real functioning brain of their very own.)
(The myth-metaphor explanation is zombies are the way all the dead from previous fights get dragged in to support and justify the latest round, generations of feuding that can make endless grinding civil wars, or just football rivalries, depending. More dead, less chance of getting it all resolved over football. They drag the living back in just like they get dragged up again. And the ones that survive with scars, they get cold and unemotional and get so tangled in the fighting they maybe forget how to live an ordinary life. They ain't dead, but they ain't so sure of that themselves as to remember how to fit in with civilians. They're kind of creepy metaphors and if I'm going to use the latter I should be very, very careful with it.)
Rangers serve an important function, but they're not a group many kids play at being in the streets, and parents do not, on the whole, hope for their child to grow up and join them. But Rangers have barracks and infirmaries and mess halls, albeit decorated in ways somewhat macabre to outsiders. In a lot of ways they're more military than religious, but their involvement with death is a somewhat religious function.
Of the 5 religious buildings in the Military district, some are probably Rangers offices. One is a memorial chapel, because everyone needs a place to sit and remember sometimes. One will be for a Chaplain of some kind, someone to tell them what they're doing is good and moral even when they're feeling pretty bad about it. I don't know about the rest.
The other nearly 100 religious buildings?
I need to figure out what religions do with their buildings, and just strip the god out of it.
So there are:
-Meal halls (like soup kitchens or gurdwaras, either a handout or a ritual that brings a community together as equals. important difference.)
-Orphanages
(Not hospitals, those are listed seperately in the MMC)
-Schools
-Martial arts schools
-Community halls used for dancing and yoga and meditation and tai chi and suchlike. Which I guess is like a school but you don't have to turn up every day or make special vows to get in.
-Somewhere to put a lot of religious art (artists that aren't doing churches would end up doing something. graffiti, if they had to.)
-Places to store emergency supplies.
-Emergency shelter.
-Homeless shelter.
-Lots of careers in religion, doing stuff that isn't just praying but is a bit like social workers now maybe. Pastoral support. That can mean a lot of things.
- Places to grieve. Cemeteries are listed seperate but places to sit and think might be extra buildings.
- Somewhere to take your last resort requests. Like, if you can't see what to do or who could possibly help, some people now take it to God and hope. Or in some countries they tie up statues of gods until the god helps out. (Well, not exactly gods, maybe saints? Awkward to translate religious concepts. Some dude that got enlightened and set out to be helpful.) Or there's bits of ancient history they excavated where they found a whole lot of little lead tablets where people were trying to curse someone by writing it on lead and throwing it in this one hole. Basically humans, when faced with something they can't manage, try one last thing, that looks like religion or superstition or just hope written down.
Getting rid of gods is hard. People would still be people. Even if they only believe in humans who got smart, or buddhas, or posthumans, it can all look like apotheosis and ancestor worship and new varieties of big beard in the sky. Probably I should leave a bunch of churches just for that.
Actually if they know their ancestors are the ones that messed up and made zombies, worship is not the most likely response. Like, the science justification for this whole world is there was a bit of an Empty Child thing with badly programmed nanotech that decided to just fix everything with human DNA, including the bits that were too dead to have much mind when they returned. However that gets passed down through myth, they're going to think that was really very stupid.
There's probably other things churches do. I don't know, haven't gone since school.
Today it is cleaner day and I should probably do my half of the work. It's not long since last cleaner day because xmas rescheduling, so my half should be pretty quick.
Also I need to put on proper clothes. Stupid pyjamas stupid broke again, yet another Tesco set with seams not up to scratch. I hung up all the laundry to dry but I'm not sure it's done yet. It has rather stacked up while I was ill.
I need to put another load in as well. I shall do that now, because it's late enough to not be antisocial any more.
Outside the walls there are 16 buildings, and they belong to the Rangers. Most of the warrior types in the city are either caravan guards or city guards. They basically hope zombies stay away, and if they turn up they'll just try hitting them or burning them until they stop moving. Rangers are zombie specialists. They make it their business to try and learn all about them. Which means they get looked at sideways as potential necromancers, but they also have the best chance of surviving zombie infested areas. They know the formula for Final Rest potion, which stops a body ever rising again, and they own the Alchemist's lab, which is also outside the walls and more than 100 yards from the nearest other people because sometimes it goes boom. They also go out and collect the dead and make sure they're at Final Rest. This is the kind of task that's going to probably take the rest of forever, hence being vaguely like religion. To them it's science. There's a finite number of dead people. There's a relatively small finite number of dead people that are lying around in the kind of places zombies rise from. Taking small numbers out of finite numbers will work eventually. So they go out and collect up bones after a Rising, or sometimes mount dangerous expeditions to old centres of habitation, to do what they can for the generations still under. And while they go out, they also go looking for those who use zombies. Doctrine says they do this so they can stop the bastards. Rumour says they do it so it can be their turn next.
Rangers know secrets. Some of them are about zombie creation. Some of them are about other results of zombies. Everyone knows about Risings, when the mindless dead get called from the earth and set out implacably to get as many people to join them as they can reach. What very few know is that sometimes, when someone survives a Rising, they get more out of it than new scars. Usually, if a zombie gets close enough to bite you or bleed on you, you're going to get torn to pieces or otherwise killed. You then rise as one of the mindless. But sometimes, instead, you escape, with terrible wounds. Then there's a chance of becoming infected. The infection is a bad one, not amenable to most healing potions. Sometimes healing potions actually make it worse, leaving wounds gaping open that had closed already. Body temperature climbs to high fever, and then plummets to hypothermic levels. Most people die. And when they die, if they don't get Final Rest immediately, they rise again. Usually as mindless things like those that attacked them. Sometimes as something with echoes of the deceased. Those ones are hardest, to know they're just as dangerous should they start to fight, but to see more of the lost one in them. There's a lot of rumours about what the Rangers do with such lost ones. Doctrine says it involves Final Rest, and the pyre. But Rangers are only human.
Most of them.
There are a few who get infected and live through it. And some of those, when they die, stay down. But the rest? Rumour and legend has it there's a few, a very few, who just won't die for long. They get cold, in more ways than one, but they stay basically themselves, and they keep moving, steady and untiring now. When a very old soldier seems particularly well preserved, there's always rumours about them. They're scarred and cold and just don't seem to care enough. Are they sure that they're still living?
(The science-tech justification is that the out of control nanotech that raises zombies does so in response to wounds, since it was intended as healing. Like the Black Spot thing in the one with Amy being a pirate. But it has stupidly bad ideas of what constitutes a healthy human being, so it just makes dumb zombies with insufficient brain for a personality, and physically unstable ones at that, and they just grab and fight and be a problem. If someone gets infected, initially the zombie nanotech tries to 'heal' them but fights with their own immune system, and possibly with healing potions if they're a relevant sort. So it can zombie heal wounds, and healing potions reopen them to heal them in a more thorough and permanent way. But if the zombie nano wins, the shonky healing gets applied all over, and they're basically zombies with slightly fresher brains. However if the immune system wins the shonky zombie nano can stick around long enough to learn how this system functions when healthy. That means it can, sometimes, rarely, end up working actually as intended, and make someone kind of sort of immortal with a real functioning brain of their very own.)
(The myth-metaphor explanation is zombies are the way all the dead from previous fights get dragged in to support and justify the latest round, generations of feuding that can make endless grinding civil wars, or just football rivalries, depending. More dead, less chance of getting it all resolved over football. They drag the living back in just like they get dragged up again. And the ones that survive with scars, they get cold and unemotional and get so tangled in the fighting they maybe forget how to live an ordinary life. They ain't dead, but they ain't so sure of that themselves as to remember how to fit in with civilians. They're kind of creepy metaphors and if I'm going to use the latter I should be very, very careful with it.)
Rangers serve an important function, but they're not a group many kids play at being in the streets, and parents do not, on the whole, hope for their child to grow up and join them. But Rangers have barracks and infirmaries and mess halls, albeit decorated in ways somewhat macabre to outsiders. In a lot of ways they're more military than religious, but their involvement with death is a somewhat religious function.
Of the 5 religious buildings in the Military district, some are probably Rangers offices. One is a memorial chapel, because everyone needs a place to sit and remember sometimes. One will be for a Chaplain of some kind, someone to tell them what they're doing is good and moral even when they're feeling pretty bad about it. I don't know about the rest.
The other nearly 100 religious buildings?
I need to figure out what religions do with their buildings, and just strip the god out of it.
So there are:
-Meal halls (like soup kitchens or gurdwaras, either a handout or a ritual that brings a community together as equals. important difference.)
-Orphanages
(Not hospitals, those are listed seperately in the MMC)
-Schools
-Martial arts schools
-Community halls used for dancing and yoga and meditation and tai chi and suchlike. Which I guess is like a school but you don't have to turn up every day or make special vows to get in.
-Somewhere to put a lot of religious art (artists that aren't doing churches would end up doing something. graffiti, if they had to.)
-Places to store emergency supplies.
-Emergency shelter.
-Homeless shelter.
-Lots of careers in religion, doing stuff that isn't just praying but is a bit like social workers now maybe. Pastoral support. That can mean a lot of things.
- Places to grieve. Cemeteries are listed seperate but places to sit and think might be extra buildings.
- Somewhere to take your last resort requests. Like, if you can't see what to do or who could possibly help, some people now take it to God and hope. Or in some countries they tie up statues of gods until the god helps out. (Well, not exactly gods, maybe saints? Awkward to translate religious concepts. Some dude that got enlightened and set out to be helpful.) Or there's bits of ancient history they excavated where they found a whole lot of little lead tablets where people were trying to curse someone by writing it on lead and throwing it in this one hole. Basically humans, when faced with something they can't manage, try one last thing, that looks like religion or superstition or just hope written down.
Getting rid of gods is hard. People would still be people. Even if they only believe in humans who got smart, or buddhas, or posthumans, it can all look like apotheosis and ancestor worship and new varieties of big beard in the sky. Probably I should leave a bunch of churches just for that.
Actually if they know their ancestors are the ones that messed up and made zombies, worship is not the most likely response. Like, the science justification for this whole world is there was a bit of an Empty Child thing with badly programmed nanotech that decided to just fix everything with human DNA, including the bits that were too dead to have much mind when they returned. However that gets passed down through myth, they're going to think that was really very stupid.
There's probably other things churches do. I don't know, haven't gone since school.
Today it is cleaner day and I should probably do my half of the work. It's not long since last cleaner day because xmas rescheduling, so my half should be pretty quick.
Also I need to put on proper clothes. Stupid pyjamas stupid broke again, yet another Tesco set with seams not up to scratch. I hung up all the laundry to dry but I'm not sure it's done yet. It has rather stacked up while I was ill.
I need to put another load in as well. I shall do that now, because it's late enough to not be antisocial any more.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-21 09:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-21 09:21 pm (UTC)Well...
Date: 2013-01-23 08:42 am (UTC)I had the biosphere and societies partly
assembled, looked around and ... realized
that unlike most of my fantasy settings,
there were no overt deities in it. Also
no prevailing religions as in our world,
where deities are usually more covert.
So I poked around at the cultures and discovered that they have philosophies in place of religions. That turned out pretty cool. I don't think I've previously seen a fantasy world based on philosophies rather than religions.