A Window Into the Future (or the project which will result in my untimely death)

I recently sent an overview of my latest project to a collaborator. It has gone through a few stages of evolution but is now in its "mature phase". I thought I'd share the key points on the blog.

There is a crocodile which has been alive since the Carboniferous era. These days it mostly sleeps and dreams about the past. Behind Gently Smiling Jaws is a setting which takes place in those dreams.

The dream world was discovered hundreds of thousands of years ago by the Naacals. These are a race of human beings who lived on a continent called Mu (which has now sunk). Mu stretched from Mexico in the East all the way across the Pacific to India in the West, and encompassed Indonesia and New Guinea. The Naacals were the ancestors of the Mayas and also of the first civilizations to take root in India. They are now gone, except for those who migrated into the crocodile's dream world, which they believed to be a paradise. They founded a city in the middle of it, in a vast ocean, and they live there still: the PCs are Naacals.

The dream world is made of mythago stuff which will warp and transmute under the influence of powerful psyches. The Naacals discovered a way to avoid this, though the method is now forgotten. But seven powerful interlopers have subsequently also independently entered the crocodile's mind, and their puissant mental energies have fundamentally changed the character of entire regions of the dream world.

There are seven of these regions, each being a volume of the book.

Vol 1 concerns The Infinite City. This is the crocodile's memory of an ancient city which pre-dated even the Naacals - a bit like Atlantis except it existed long before even Atlantis did. It was a city of canals (somewhat like Venice) and built of warm-coloured sandstone (pink, orange, etc.). The crocodile remembers it as a kind of jumbled up Escher-like vision of crazy architecture broken up into chunks by a huge network of canals. It is now home to a Portuguese conquistador called Jorge de Menezez who has created a city-state in the middle of it. He dreams of using this as a base to raise an army by which to go back to the real world and conquer it and become an emperor. But because his character is militarist and expansionist, the entire Infinite City is like that now as well, so it exists in a state of continual warfare between bitter and implacable rival factions.

Vol 2 concerns The Dreamtime of Man. This is the crocodile's memories of the era when human beings first evolved - it's populated by its reptilian ideas about aquatic apes, Australopithecus, etc. The geography is lots of rivers, lots of savannah, lots of forest. It is now the home of Pape Jan, who is the man the English call Prester John - a King of Ethiopia who founds his way into the crocodile's dream world. He has built a fortress there and wants to covert all the aquatic apes and hominids to Christianity. But his lands have become riven by sectarianism, and Pape Jan has also brought with him lots of ideas about King Solomon's demons, which he has unwittingly made real in the mythago stuff of the dream world. So as well as Pape Jan there are demon princes now living there too. 

Vol 3 concerns The Memories of Ruin. This is the crocodile's memories of the aftermath of the meteor strike which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Volcanoes, earthquakes, crevasses, floods, and dried up lakes and rivers are everywhere - as well as dying dinosaurs, ghost dinosaurs, dinosaur liches, and so forth. (The avian dinosaurs and mammals are thriving, though.) It is now the home of Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani, a pre-Islamic Arab neoplatonist philosopher who wants peace and tranquility to reign. He has built a madrassah in which to teach and meditate. He has studied extensively in the histories of Greek, Roman and Near Eastern philosophy and many of the figures from these history books appear in the mythago stuff in his realm.

Vol 4 concerns The Ziggurats Under the Ocean. This is the crocodile's memories of weird structures built by aliens on the bottom of a shallow sea in a now-extinct ocean millions of years ago. It is now the home of Anak Wungsu, a Balinese Hindu trader of great wealth. Because he is obsessed with wealth, commerce and trade, those desires have infected the aliens who comprise the mythago stuff in his memory realm, so the inhabitants of the ziggurats obsessively trade with, and steal from, each other. 

Vol 5 concerns The Dreams of Ice. This is the crocodile's memories of an ice age during which it hibernated in a burrow underground. It was dimly aware of the ice around it and occasionally woke for brief periods to feed. During that time it saw pack ice, glaciers and ice bergs, and black rocky mountains here and there sticking up into the sky. This realm is the home of Sese-Mahuru-Bau, a New Guinea native hunter who came into the crocodile's mind looking for legendary beasts to slay and bring to his prospective father-in-law as a dowry. While this region is mostly comprised of ice and glaciers and snow at the base level, here and there are mountains, and on the mountains is where Sese-Mahuru-Bau's presence has transformed the mythago stuff into New Guinea-style rainforests. Each mountain is shrouded in low-lying cloud, and above the cloud zone is jungle, inhabited by the legendary creatures Sese-Mahuru-Bau imagines for his prey.

Vol 6 concerns The Wide and Peaceful Sea. These are the crocodile's pleasant memories of drifting across the warm Pacific Ocean long ago. Here and there are atolls and islands with palm trees. It is home to Xu Fu, a Chinese sorceror who came to the crocodile's mind looking for the Elixir of Eternal Life, which he has heard is on a paradise mountain known as Mount Penglai. He has created a version of this mountain in the mythago stuff from his own psyche and populated it with people and creatures of Chinese folklore and legend. While the ocean here and the atoll and islands are of the Pacific, Mount Penglai itself (rising up from the ocean a bit like Mount Fuji on its own island) has the feel of Chinese legend - cedar forests, fog, delicate pagodas and so on.

Vol 7 concerns The Primordial Swamp. These are the crocodile's memories of the swamp into which it was born, in the Carboniferous era hundreds of millions of years ago. It is a very fecund, hot, humid, green swamp of ferns and primitive trees. There are other strange crocodilians here, as well as amphibian creatures, dimetrodons and so on. It is also now home to Ebu Gogo. She is the last remnant of a hominid people who survived into the human era living on an island in the Philippines but were all killed by Spanish conquistadors. She fled to the crocodile's mind in order to mother a new tribe. She does this by breeding with the crocodile's memories of ancient amphibian things to create half-human, half-mythago-stuff hybrids who proliferate and mutate in the infinite swamp.