A brothers hand

The first brothers had a certain synergy, largley held up by the tempurate actions of the younger. Always ensuring that his brothers actions would be fruitfull, watching from behind the curtain and pushing the world towards order. He loved his brothers messes and was enthralled by guiding them to their shared goal. Each new crux of disorder was a place their dreams could be born. He shadowed his brother, watching the proceses unfold in his wake, altering the laws they had laid in sequnce to fit their visions.

Of course there were mistakes, and they teach temperate more and more each time. Showing the guiding hand where to go through unrecoverable disaster. Grand actions leading where they sometimes do, a destroyed world rotten with perfection or fear.


A brothers chaos

Of the two brothers one stood out. He was the louder and more enthusiastic one. As opposed to his counterpart who watched from the background, carefully planning each action. The grander brother rushed through ther plan and couldn’t sit still while the universe was defined. Facinated with every machination of their nature he did an uncountable number of expiriments that have altered the world they were building, so manny that even they could not predict their reprecusions.

But then, where is the fun in knowing everything? Grander just wanted to see his art work it’s way out of the chaos he made, to see everything fall into line by essetential and simple rules. Each action taken carelessly by the brother was intended to sow the chaotic energy of the early universe, making a mess bg enough it would clean itself. The end result of granders chaos formed only by his brothers temperate hand.


The first brothers (lore concept)

There was a time in the past, a time where location was nonsense and the allpowerfull had not yet been forged. In this abstract place when time never changed a spark hotter than any that will ever exist made itself. That spark had been on a quest to forge a world of beauty and free will, things that had been long lost in it’s home. From that spark grew two beings, entities of creation whose definitions did not yet exist, by today’s words they were the first brothers.

These eternal siblings had the whole of existence in their hands and a shared idea of perfection. To them perfection was not in defined calculations or exercising precision in all things, but they sought perfection from emergence. To see the world build itself with no goals in mind, balancing its own aspects through mistakes and catastrophe. Watching the wildfires rage themselves into fields of nourished flowers and letting consciousness war its way to peace.


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.


The mandates : Introduction

The story

Imagine the world around you being made up of infinitesimally small parts interacting by defined rules to form what you inherently know to be real. Layer upon layer of static buzzing around and making the world by emergence. Every object standing out only by its properties and definition. This is the world through the eye of a mandate. This is the world as you would see it at the smallest scale.

Mandates are normal humans that can control the world at that scale. They retain all of the flaws we have but can use the energy around them to change matter with only their will. This ability can be broken down into two parts, sight and control.

Sight:
The ability to sense the world as individual parts and understand how it interacts at every scale at a given moment in time. This grants mandates access to an immense amount of information at all times, to them everything is always exploding with new knowledge, a new key or avenue to explore and discover. However, understanding can be a curse without the power to react to it.

Control:
The ability to alter what they see once they understand it. The key to this ability lies with their sight. To take advantage of it they must know how the world works when they try to alter it. Understanding is the currency here, the more essential their understanding, the more impact this ability has.

With these two abilities they can do what science only dreams of and what we wish for in our most grandiose magic systems. Networks of energy built with defined tasks, interconnected intelligent machines, and solutions to modern everyday problems like locking the door behind you!
Just like with real life skills every mandate has a specialty. Making, defining, life, and specific materials like fire or wood are all examples of what a mandate can specialize in. The more basic and broad a specialty the more power it can have, but when a specialty is focused the mandate has more refined control over that area.

A mandates abilities are a simple tool to them. As intuitive as your arms and hands while having a scope just as vast. Easy to use and impossible to ever truly master. The use of their abilities are reflexive at times, allowing for near misses and an integrated life with them. They live with their powers, everything thing they do is with them in mind.
While they are a simple tool, their powers can do grand things with the right wielder. Each mandate has to learn how to use their powers from the world around them, they must make inferences and leaps to find new knowledge about what they can do. Their powers require an innate understanding of what they are doing at every scale before it can be done, making what they can do very limiting. Such is the power of a stupid god, without the knowledge of your task, you are trapped.

The theory

To me mandates embody the human characteristic of creation and still have the beautiful flaw of differing perspectives. Each mandate, while they have the ability to accomplish anything, has their own perspective and way of doing things. They have to go through the same processes of learning logic and understanding the world around them that we do, leading to mistakes and misunderstandings that, with the scope of their abilities, could lead to disaster.

At the end of the day the mandates are humans playing with the powers of gods, mistakes that happen can be beautiful or catastrophic.
This is where the core of this lies for me. The grand scale of what can be done with such an open magic system as well as the places it can clearly go wrong along the way entices me. Everything is fair game, any rule, any limit, any angle. Its all here and ready to be laid out.

I will keep updates about the mandates going here, more refined ideas as they come and discussion starters as well. I’ve been working at this for a few years and this was me trying to go back to what brought me to the idea in the first place.
It jumps all over the place, I know, but the idea has become so expansive over the years that its hard to find the beginning again. I still remember the first day I thought of it, and that’s what the next post in this theme will be about.