During the Shutdown War between the alien species known as the Arweli, and the Robot collective known as Groupthink, massive planetwide bombardments occurred.
Arweli industrial planets were targeted particularly as a means of slowing their war effort. Several times, Groupthink suicide ships equipped with a preciously irreplaceable drive crystals would jump deep behind the battle lines and into Arweli territory to unleash a planet wide barrage of atomic weaponry faster than the defenses of the planets could react. The resulting devastation of industrial facilities on the surface of these planets released unimaginable amounts of toxic byproducts into the environments.
After the war, many species including humans would make expeditions to these dead worlds in pursuit of resources, but would find mutated and degraded offshots of the Arweli species clinging to existence in the ruins.
(Sorry this is a repost, Beehaw defederated and apparently the original post I made disappeared)
Really enjoying the color scheme in this. What was the cause of the Shutdown War?
Also Beehaw defederated? I’m glad you reposted anyway, as I’m experiencing a ton of federation issues with this community and can only see/interact with some of its posts :(
What was the cause of the Shutdown War?
The war was between an alien race known as the Arweli, and a bio-organic robot collective known as Groupthink. The Arweli had been constantly expanding their territory by annexing the worlds of less powerful races. Eventually they brushed up against the territory of the Groupthink. What started as a minor dispute over the world of a third race situation on the border, which was attempting relations with both sides escalated somewhat uncontrollably into a total war.
The name of the war was retroactively applied. It was given that name as it marked the shutdown of Groupthink, when the supercomputer ships that maintained the group consciousness were infiltrated and poisoned. This caused a shutdown of Groupthink, reverting robots back to isolated individual consciousnesses only, and stopped the war it’s tracks.
Some humans also suggest the name applies to the shutdown of the Arweli central government, who were the other side of the war. After the war the central government was fractured and a shadow of it’s former self, with numerous leaders claiming to have legitimate leadership, and many other groups splintering off entirely.
Also Beehaw defederated?
Yeah, the mods are having a moment, they defederated from lemmy.world for mod drama reasons. It kind of sucks because some of my old posts are up, but some aren’t and a lot of comments of mine and of people who commented on my stuff disappeared. I’ll post things for lemmy.world from this account from now on.
Quite an interesting tradeoff! If the drive crystals were irreplaceable and precious, does it mean that it was a last resort move from Groupthink as they would have lost otherwise? Did the sacrifice of these ships impact Groupthink’s overall mobility? Does the fact that there are now humans roaming the area show that the robots didn’t last for long after having Godzilla’d the Arweli?
Also, I dig the retro posing and coloring of your illustrations!
The suicide attack ships were meant to break the stalemate that the war had become, and they were successful in allowing the robots to deeply enter Arweli territory before being stopped. This late offensive in the war is why the Arweli government collapsed at the end.
The crystals have unusual properties, but the short version here is that they are required for faster than light travel, and they can not be artificially made.
The crystal using suicide ships were novel for a few reasons. It was presumed that the robots didn’t have much in the way of crystals, since they very rarely used FTL ships aside from their massive moon sized nodesphere ships. The second reason is that the robots did have a spiritual reverence for the crystals, which is another topic too detailed for this comment, but it was presumed they wouldn’t use the crystals in such a way.
The war ended with the collapse of the Groupthink and Arweli as factions. Their former territories were ravaged by destruction, and humans among other aliens who had been displaced for their own homes by the war flooded into this territory for land grabs or to scavenge the valuable resources left in the rubble.
Humans weren’t unified before the war, and their interactions with the robots and Arweli varied. Some humans, and human factions may have positive, neutral, or negative opinions on the robots and Arweli. Some settlements welcome one or both, some ban them with extreme prejudice. It’s a complex topic. I apologize for deferring so much, but a lot of this seems like it needs its own post and infograph!
Thanks for liking my art, I keep trying to zero in on an aesthetic that’s in my head and commit it to paper.
That’s the thing with worldbuilding, topics are interconnected and often deserve their own diving into. One aspect that strikes me: the robots have a spiritual reverence ror the crystals? Is it the result of their primary purpose or programming? What were they designed to do at first?
As for generally not using FTL, is it because they can afford the long travel time since they can shut down temporarily? That would still imply a huge quantity of traffic in order to sustain their territory and keep regular control of it.
Did other factions like the Arweli make more extensive use of FTL?
Reverence result of programming.
Part of what I need to get into is the nature of the robots. They have synthetically created organic brains. The robots and their synthetic organic brains are created in the gigantic nodesphere ships. These ships are the size of moons, and serve many purposes. The ships each house massive crystals at their center, far larger than those found by any other race. The size of the crystal correlates with how large of a faster than light ship can be, and the robots are the only known faction to have such huge ones. The fact that the giant crystals are at the core of the ships, and the ships create the robots has something to do with their ability to access shared thoughts. This is a mystery both in universe and because I haven’t fully worked it out yet.
However the fact that the crystals are central to their creation does inspire reverence.
The original creation of the robots and their original purpose are unknown. I have some ideas but haven’t fully committed to any yet. The fact that they are human formed and that there has even been a successful transfer of a human consciousness into a robot body suggests a connection between them and humanity even though they come from a region very far from earth and their technology is clearly not like what humans are capable of. Again, I have ideas but haven’t committed to a particular one yet, so at that point in the lore I just make things foggy.
The robots tend to use FTL in their nodesphere ships, traveling as a mass. When a ship shows up, it’s like a planet’s worth of robots appearing.
All robots can collectively send and receive thoughts of other robots in range of a local nodesphere, which would be about a planetary system’s distance, and each nodesphere can instantly transfer all of this to any other nodesphere regardless of distance. Essentially any robot can share thoughts with any other robot anywhere in the network instantly. This makes their organization extremely efficient. A robot world mining resources will know exactly what an incoming nodesphere needs. In a battle, the situational awareness of the robots is almost total.
All races with FTL use the crystals. Other races only have small shards, but find them in decent enough quantity. The thing about the crystals is that they can not be destroyed, or physically altered by any known means. If you have a big crystal, you can’t chip off pieces to make smaller ones. If a ship with a crystal is destroyed, even if the whole ship is vaporized, the crystal remains. Hooking up multiple crystals into a single FTL drive to increase the size of a ship that can be moved is possible but extremely delicate and difficult. Most ships use single pieces of crystal sized appropriately. The fact that crystals have been discovered clearly smashed with fragments that used to be part of a single piece is one of the mysteries because nobody knows how that is possible. Out of universe, I am thinking something along the lines of these crystals shattering was the big bang and the beginning of time, perhaps to get wilder, their reformation back into a whole might be the end of time or would create a new big bang. This possibility is where the narrative for characters I have in the world leans as they try to stop that, and the robots and their religion are mixed up in it.
I like narratives that scale, and with my central characters, a story that goes from somebody working a dead end factory job trying to afford a better prosthetic arm that slowly scales into killing god to stop the end of time is the kind of thing I like.
I should also make the distinction between this type of robot and a traditional type made of entirely conventional circuitry and programming. Those also exist in this universe, and many races and factions make use of them to varying degrees, although the level of artificial intelligence of traditional robots is much lower and not dynamic or sapient.
Ok, if I followed correctly, then in that case your robots are more an autonomous synthetic lifeform, and since they even have organic brains, they are even technically cyborgs. So an army of tube grown Grievous, so to speak^^. Which does justify spirituality though.
The hivemind aspect is a nice addition, especially if regular organics can be connected to it. Though it does give a huge advantage to Groupthink, especially when space distances are involved… Feels like the Arweli didn’t have a chance!
The dynamic around the crystal shards is interesting, very high scale if it connects to the whole universe being created or destroyed.
But given that there are enough shards even in that area of space to allow at least several civilizations to expand off of them, the task to gather them all seems to be insanely difficult, barring the intervention of a truly godlike being. Moreover it would necessarily mean that whoever tries to gather them has the power to detect them, even if they have been sent into a Black Hole for instance. Of course they would also need the capacity to retrieve them from there too.
I also like high scale stories, but they have in my opinion one great weakness: you end up needing to buff the protagonist to insane levels of aptitude and powers to be up to the task, and when they are there, they have nothing human or relatable left as a character. Like in Mistborn from Sanderson for example…
Cyborgs
Technically speaking yes, though I am somewhat hesitant to refer to them that way as it implies a naturally organic component. Thinking of them as Grevious is I think close, with the change that the brains are artificially made rather than transplanted.
Hivemind and regular organics
A clarification: A human consciousness was transplanted into a single, individual robot in the post-war era, after the hivemind had been broken.
As for humans, accessing a hivemind ability is something that was researched in-universe after the war. It actually lead to the creation of an extremely powerful side character, as the experiment went out of control and ended up with a character drawing inspiration from Tetsuo from Akira, though without the immediate self destruction spiral.
Gathering them seems difficult without a godlike being
I’ve got some ideas. I’ve got a highly powerful character that appears after the war. This character grows more powerful with more crystals collected, and formed a cult of robots as a kind of robot Illuminati, and some of those robots have some extra power gifted to them.
High scale needs high protagonist
The main three characters I have at the core, who are my most common narrative leads and window into this universe are skilled but not “super powered” or chosen or anything like that. There is the above mentioned Tetsuo power level character who exists but as a secondary character. So the powerful character exists, but the window is through more normal scaled ones.
I’m not sure how coherent and/or impenetrable this lore is all coming off. Everything in this thread is all in the span of about 12 years in-universe. A lot of changes packed into this time period since I tend to design settings around characters and events first rather than geography, which I’m terrible at making.
My setting wears its inspirations on its sleeve. Many of them are obvious and fairly mainstream, others are more obscure but I try to take what I like and blend them up to make a adventure-wester-scifi-war story-setting with mystical overtones.
Akira! A fine reference indeed…
About creating order
I find it interesting that you already seem to have your main cast worked out, even as you seem to be still refining core elements of the world itelf. You start out with chars, then events then?
About obvious references
I think it’s quite ok having the DNA of the work plain to see, it’s in a way more honest than to basically try to masquerade obvious calques as new ideas. Moreover, it can even become quite a creative challenge, trying to fit together different influences that don’t necessarily work well together.
About scale
Personally I always feel like the scale of stories is what makes it hardest to import concept from one story to another. When “Galaxies” are in danger, you can’t really take much time to talk about human drama for the main cast, as it would make them feel really egocentric or oblivious of what’s at stake.
Regarding the geography-history conendrum
I totally get you. I usually have only broad ideas for the lay of the land, and will start creating loose pieces and main events that will find their place locally when I eventually decide on geography…
Usually it’s eventually a back and forth, moving forward with geography creates context for events or requires adjustments, sometimes generates new events that will in turn need to be inserted in the geography. It’s endless…
The way this universe came about was I would doodle on small post-it notes at work. I started challenging myself to create images within the confines of a post it note that were evocative of a story or setting. Nothing pre-planning, just drawing images. Eventually I started repeating character designs and refining them which turned into the reoccurring characters, and at that point I started creating coherent connections between the pictures.
I still tend to start with doodles until I happen upon one I like and then after it’s drawn I start asking myself what the backstory is for what I’m seeing.
There is certainly an escalation of the scale of events. It doesn’t jump right into the largest scale. It is a ramp up, where the evolution of characters reveals larger context. I think the maximum galaxy scale threat kind of element, once it comes into focus will be a very short climax, scaling back down once it’s over. The key is dropping a lot of context to that climax without revealing what it is until I’m ready for the immediate conflict and resolution. There’s a lot of Babylon 5 DNA in that aspect.
The universe will go on after that point, I just haven’t built anything in that era.
The character themselves are also not sort of blank slate 16 year old adventurers during this time period. Kind of drawing some Cowboy Bebop energy with all of the main cast being damaged goods. Each of them has had something big in their life taken away from them, and they’ve already gone through the giant space war experience so there is both a vibe that they are jaded, but also they won’t just panic at the sight of new events.
I’ve got quite a lot of side character content where those side characters are not as entirely developed, but I take the same approach of figuring out what damaged them and what they want rather than writing them as villain or hero. Except for my actual villains, they evil.
