Thursday, March 22, 2007

The Void Spawn

I thought I’d talk a little about how my fiendish mind works, or at least the creative side:

For the role playing game, I’ve created a minor race called the Void Spawn. They come from the name I gave one of my characters in City of Villains: a cloven-hoofed creature with a skull for a head. So, for my own game, I used the name, but I couldn’t use the image from COV, so I started looking at the www.daz3d.com website for a model I could buy. I decided to use a particular one that looks like a very fierce devil.

At this point, I started to write the back story for the Void Spawn. I took the word “void” and that reminded me of a recent Dr. Who episode where they talked about a place between dimensions called the Void. That reminded me of a Dr. Who adventure I had written back in high school that took place outside of time and space in an area called Absolute Elsewhere. I think I got that concept from an episode of Cosmos with Carl Sagan talking about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity: basically if you image two triangles, the top one is the future and the bottom one is the past. Where the two triangles meet (at the point) is the present. Anything not inside those two triangles is called Absolute Elsewhere; outside time and space. So, I decided that’s where the Void Spawn come from: the Void (or Absolute Elsewhere).

Today, I started thinking about their culture and I went back to the devil model I had decided to use. I thought about devils and how they are associated with Hell, and Hell is associated with pain and suffering. So, the Void Spawn enjoy inflicting pain. Well, what if I went a little farther than that: what if they felt actual pleasure from inflicting and receiving pain? Now, what if they didn’t understand that pain was not pleasurable for other organisms? That’s when it hit me that the Void Spawn actually believe they’re doing people a “service” by torturing them! From their own mindset, pain equals pleasure; and therefore everyone should feel pleasure from pain. They are unable to see things from another point of view.

So, that’s how I came up with the Void Spawn. ;-)

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Wiki Me!

I’m in the process of migrating the Imperium Database section of the website into an Imperium Wiki. I installed the wiki stuff last Friday night (with some difficulty of course) and I’ve been learning how to use it since then. I even modified the default wiki “skin” to look and behave more like the rest of the website. My intent is to not only include the general Imperium Universe stuff, but also info for the role-playing game I’m currently working on. As for the game, it’s coming along. See my previous post for a link to the ongoing project diary (which I’ve been updating nearly every day).