Interloper Idea (and why I shelved it)

 

Back in the early iterations of my setting, I had the idea of having some sort "inter-dimensional being" to explain game “magic” in my setting.

Reason being?

It was originally a TTRPG setting idea for Savage Worlds, which I was playing at the time. With it being a TTRPG setting having fun active abilities was necessary in my mind.

Give players options, and opportunities to do things besides I shoot or punch this guy.

However as time went on, each time I went back and back to the setting, the idea of the Interloper, this indifferent “god” that accidentally imparts gifts upon random humans in his passing. In many ways, the interloper idea was something to give the universe a slice of fantastic in lieu of boring reality.

But getting older, reading more, and learning more about everything, the need for the Interloper faded in face of what is possible in the mundane of what we currently know and can theoretically knew. For me, that helped a lot as I build my settings wholesale as an ecosystem instead of bunch of ideas put together.

Using existing (and near future) technology with only one big thing help made building the world of Alone in the Void, much easier and faster than my the Bronze Age setting which is on hiatus.

My desire to scale back my setting at the beginning to much more smaller and digestible in a world building sense grew. From hundreds and thousands of star systems that could be randomly generated by a table (remember TTRPG), down to our solar system, further down into inner system, then further down into just:

•  Earth
• The Moon
• Mars
• The space between

In thus much smaller cramped space, those planets with one or two settlements in it became city habitats. Earth became the vast foreign alien landscape that was our home, paradise lost to us. And Mars became the frontier where city-states fought each other because humans are gonna human.

(NOTE: The idea corporate and NGO city-states was a thread that I held on to from the first iteration, which I am proud if.)

Amidst all this human "mundanity" the need for the Interloper became unneeded in my eyes. It did not add to the setting, in many ways it took away from the setting. There was already weird shit going on with the entire “Earth gets terraformed into a hot house planet suited for a different species that may or may not be dead”.

I don’t need a extra-dimensional “thing” going around handing out space candy.

It just doesn’t fit the setting at the moment.

Will I re-introduce in the future?

Maybe in a few years, once I wrote down a few stories, laid some meat on the bones, I have the future meta-history of the setting plotted out a few centuries.

Maybe then I can introduce the magic space whales in again.

For now, the whales will be hiding beyond our vision.