How would a shapeshifter die, be killed or be wounded?

When a shield graduates, how many things can a typical shield transform into?

What is the official reason that the older shifters agree to have their younglings be trained to bond with humans?

Quote:Original post by Wai
How would a shapeshifter die, be killed or be wounded?

When a shield graduates, how many things can a typical shield transform into?

What is the official reason that the older shifters agree to have their younglings be trained to bond with humans?

Shifters live longer than humans, but do eventually die of natural causes. They can be killed by cutting them in half and preventing the pieces from reuniting, or they can be killed by electrocution or extreme heat or cold or if you catch them by surprise and they don't have time to switch to a stronger form dropping a really big rock on them might work. They also tend to lose motivation and just waste away if they aren't bonded to a human, or commit suicide if their human is killed.

A typical graduating shield has one human form, if bonded they have several armor forms, if not bonded they have several defensive forms involving coating themselves in diamond or making themselves reflective, maybe 3 animal forms including one which can fly, they can heal basic human injuries or keep a critically human alive inside them until they can get to a skilled healer, and they can produce water and ration bars for their human if they are stranded without supplies.

Shifters, being lazy and easy-going are very lassiez-faire about their children and pretty much let them do what they want, whether that's wander or go to the human school or bond with a human. The younglings themselves think humans are very interesting and dramatic. The human instructors coax them to come to school with rewards of storytelling, games, and toys for those who do well in class. The shifter instructors offer to teach the children how to take fun shapes, teach them how to help a hurting friend, and tell them funny things about humans and other weird animals. The shifters being partially empathic tend to be drawn to those few humans whose emotions they can sense, and if they feel that one of these really needs their help they will feel the instinctive urge to bond to that person.

I have more questions but the conversation was getting odd. I feel that I am asking in order to decide whether to collaborated, and I was not quite sure what there is to collaborate, since many concepts in your world building are set. Perhaps you could have posed this thread as an open ended game, by first giving the premises that you already have, and then ask:

Suppose that you are a new trainee of the academy, what abilities would you want your shapeshifter to have? What do you want the two of you to become?

Now, it seems necessary to ask what characters you already have. I think that you must already have many characters. I think this is the better way to set up the project in the beginning.

Imagine that it is the first day of class. What personality would you (your character and your shield-to-be) bring? Starting from this, I think that the story will be very intertwined without any unnecessary plot devices.

[Edited by - Wai on December 8, 2006 2:46:01 AM]

Quote:Original post by Wai
I have more questions but the conversation was getting odd. I feel that I am asking in order to decide whether to collaborated, and I was not quite sure what there is to collaborate, since many concepts in your world building are set. Perhaps you could have posed this thread as an open ended game, by first giving the premises that you already have, and then ask:

Suppose that you are a new trainee of the academy, what abilities would you want your shapeshifter to have? What do you want the two of you to become?

Now, it seems necessary to ask what characters you already have. I think that you must already have many characters. I think this is the better way to set up the project in the beginning.

Imagine that it is the first day of class. What personality would you (your character and your shield-to-be) bring? Starting from this, I think that the story will be very intertwined without any unnecessary plot devices.

Oh, I should have explained better. The worldbuilding is mostly set, it is the characters and plot where the collaboration is taking place. The other collaborators are currently coming up with character ideas and plots for those characters.

Quote:Original post by Borkhan
similar concept was developed in the book Next of kin, by Eric Frank Russel.
the idea of contributing stories from different writers on the same premise was done in SF series of books. cant remember name, but they were all about one, very dismal city.
shapeshifters also appear in Dune series. is there any similarity?

just my 0,02 Euros :-))

There have been many projects where multiple writers wrote stories in the same setting. Although this collaboration is more like the way a group of people cooperatively come up with story ideas for a soap opera or a series like star trek. Haven't heard of Next of Kin, I'll check that out, thanks. No particular similarity to the shapeshifters in Dune - probably most similar to the shapeshifters in Julie E Czerneda's _Beholder's Eye_, although still not exactly the same.

When a pair graduate, what rank would they be compared to other soldiers? Or perhaps I should ask, what is the condition to graduate? At what age does a trainee begin at the academy?

The way dojo usually works is that there is no fine line of 'graduation'. Do you know the ranking systems of dojos (like judo or kendo dojo?). Are there ranks before graduation? Are there ranks afterward?

For the training, besides human-shifter teamwork, do they also group with other trainees? Will teamwork between humans with shifters matter after graduation? What is the class size? How many trainees will graduate per year? How does the academic decide who to train and who to reject?

What is the state of the country? Is it actually at war?

How many characters do you already have? What are those character?

Thanks for all the good questions guys, this is really helping me flesh out the setting! [smile] I'll answer both your questions together since they overlap a little:


Historically the school started out as a dojo, but at the time the story starts it has matured into a military academy. There is a standardized exam one must pass to graduate - or rather, 2 standardized exams, one for humans completing sword training and one for bonded human-shifter pairs completing sword and shield training (which is sort of like graduate school for those swords lucky enough to bond with a shield). Somewhere around 50 humans graduate to be swords each year, and 8-10 newly bonded pairs go through 'graduate school' each year.

The shifters themselves do not have a graduation exam, instead they (10-15 per year) go through a sort of puberty fever when they turn 20 that marks their physical maturity and the activation of their ability to bond with a human. At any point after this they can volunteer to join the army, apprentice with an older shifter who specializes in something they're interested in, start looking for a human to bond with or bond with a human they've already become friends with, or go on a journey, wandering around exploring the world.

Anyone joining the army straight out of school enters at the lowest rank, being given the safest and most annoying jobs and babysat by more experienced soldiers. The may be assigned in small teams so that they can learn together and be more easily supervised. A sword who is already in the army when he or she bonds with a shifter would retain their current rank and the shifter would be elevated to that rank.

Before graduation shifters have no rank except a general respect for those who can do impressive tricks and those who are older. The humans have basic ranks depending on how many years of the program they have completed, and within each year group there is dueling to establish a pecking order, those people who are the children or younger siblings of swords have a home field advantage over those who aren't, and also the usual highschool/college cliques, popularity contests, and issues with who has rich parents and who doesn't and who is lovers with who. I dunno about whether the students are assigned into long-term teams - I'll leave that to someone who wants to write a story involving students to decide.

Diversity among humans comes mainly from what weapon they prefer to use and whether they are good at magic, and if so what type of magic. There are 3 styles of weapon use: using a normal weapon, using a normal weapon coated in ki or reiatsu or whatever we decide to call their spiritual energy, and calling forth a weapon of pure spiritual energy. The academy is prejudiced against those who prefer to use magic instead of physical combat - both the entrance exam and the graduation exam require physical combat skills. Specialization is thus an issue of personal ability an preference, not an issue of having classes within the academy. There probably are nicknames for the different styles of fighting though. Are human magical energy and shifter energy compatible? Well, that's another thing I can leave to those who want to write combat to decide.

A shield (shifter bonded to a human) an indeed form itself into wings to make the human fly or a padded shell to protect a 'human cannonball'. The country is not actively at war, instead the surrounding area (where they don't have any shifters) is in a feudal or warring city-states period, where there are clans, fortresses, warlords, mages, bandits, alliance marriages, trade caravans, mercenaries, and all that sort of thing. So there's always some mission needing to be done but not that much bloodshed or death.

We are currently working to establish a core cast of characters but nothing is final yet. Myself I have an idea for a villain, an adult unbonded shifter, and a shifter who likes to play matchmaker. Another writer proposed the human military leader be a hardass woman general who has a bad relationship with her daughter and a male sword who is contemptuous of shifters.

Consistency of tone - what we are doing is each character will always have their dialogue written by one particular writer. The writers will work together to decide the overall plot, and the different writers' strands of the story will be woven together to create a fairly uniform texture. Plot-wise the tone of existing long mangas isn't that consistent, there are usually dramatic episodes and comic episodes and romantic episodes, so I think we'll be fine there as long as we weave them together evenly. I don't know what sort of sample I could show you - nothing for this project has been written yet.

Edit: Link removed, this project will be developed here instead.

[Edited by - sunandshadow on December 9, 2006 5:21:56 PM]