The first day

The mandates have been a catch all for my dreams and aspirations for almost as long as I’ve had any sort of presence online. They were born of boredom on one of the early days of my first job, wandering around the parking lot thinking of a way to meld different stories. Essentially I was trying to figure out a way to build a world in which any character would fit. Seems like a simple idea, but the answer I came up with has a lot of ramifications.

If anyone can have any power with any or no limits, then the system should have no limits, and with no limits you have no story. I think we can agree on that much. I spent weeks dragging that idea through the mud from every angle I could think of, and at the end of it all, I found that there is a limit. The key, at least is this iteration, is the beings that live without limits. Beings who can lie so well they fool themselves, who’s superstitions limit their way of life, who spend their lives in a race for power of mind and body. Humans without limits would not be the omnipotent gods of our dreams, but broken things with the same issues we have, just a magnitude or two greater in consequence.

This would not strictly be a story of displaying incredible powers that frame situations, but rather a story of how the human condition is affected by obtaining whatever it wills. The consequences of having your desires granted just as easily and quickly as they come, with no more effort than it takes to think them. The everyday situations that come out of a community with these powers would be very similar to what we find in real life, the struggles they have are affected by similar metrics. While they may not want material things, goals in life are not often solely material, but rather they come from the comfort or stability that things bring to life. In a world where your whims are acted out on the world, what is ever stable?


As I said, this world has been a catch all for my dreams since that day. It’s easy to build a character in a world when the only thing you have to worry about is their beliefs about their powers, and it’s enticing to imagine a world in which so many different power sets can interact. But it’s time I start using it as a catch all and really get down to business putting the world together. With this post I am going to start working out each of the sections of the story myself. No more waiting on others to bounce ideas off of, no more waiting for time or motivation. I refuse to let this dream die, it means too much to me.

I will be releasing a second calendar page over the next week outlining milestones for the project. Essentially pinning me down to a time. I’m going to start slow, but it will be done. First things first, the premise. I will release that within a month of this post and link it back to here, stay tuned.