Minor worldbuilding help

[mrissa]

So I'm working on a thing, and in this thing, some gods have devised a system of handing out magic powers based on birth order. These gods are non-hypothetical: they show up in person. They are also highly idiosyncratic. So the question at hand is not going to be a matter of The Universe Is Like That, because there are other gods elsewhere in this thing that do things very differently. So it's not that All Firstborns Everywhere Are Like X, it's that these specific local powers have decided to treat firstborns in a certain way and secondborns in another and so on.

I got to thinking -- not that it's going to be relevant, of course -- about what happens if one of the older siblings gets killed while the parents are still having kids. And so far I don't have a very good story-related way to say that it should work one way or another, so here I am asking you:

[Poll #674498]

If your answer is, "Don't do it that way at all," please just don't answer.

I'm also very charmed by the elephant selkies timprov and I have been discussing. "Because selkies are all 'oooh, I have soft brown eyes,'" I said, "and then, hrrrronnnnnnnk!" There will also be walkies. Not the kind I'm taking Ista on in a minute, either. The kind with tusks. But not in this thing. Not until the next thing, because there's not room in this thing for half of what's in it, much less more stuff, and I know more stuff will sneak in accidentally. So we will plan the elephant selkies ---hrrrrronnnk! -- for later.

Now I'm going around the house going hrrrronnnnk!

Because I am delicate and demure, is why.

Comments

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I can see all sorts of arguments. Given that any interesting literary magic takes some effort, and rewards that effort, #2 produces more stable results, and #3 perhaps more interesting story problems. Hmmm; #1 does also, as the family with 5 kids might not have the 5 powers expected.

Were these gods trying to accomplish something specific with this system? Like making it possible for most families to thrive? Or just playing games?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

#3 perhaps more interesting story problems

If a second-born magic-user leaves Baltimore going 70 mph....

Surviving/thriving are major factors here, but the gods are not omniscient, nor particularly nice, so they're not the only major factors.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I think birthorder gifts should stay regardless of intervening events. This could make for some interesting conflict, when a person is nominally the "first born" but doesn't have the gifts to do the first born thing in a first born kind of way.

[wilfulcait.livejournal.com]

Hrrrooonk!

I think it should depend on how close-knit the key families are in your story, and here's why:

If the family is close-knit, I would go with option 1. There would be an assumption that by having x children the family got access to powers 1 through x. Thus, losing a sib out of the sequence means the family sudden loses the powers that sib had. Plot will ensue.

If it is a story about individuals operating out of a family/sibling structure, I'd go with 3. Individual who currently has (and is used to solving problems with), e.g., power over water "stuff" loses a sib and suddenly has power only over plant "stuff." Plot will ensue.

Them's my thoughts. Hhhhrrrooooonk!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's a very clan-based society.

[jenett]

Options 2 and 3 seem to present more possibilities for story weirdness (in the sense of Another Growth Opportunity, this may not be pleasant.)

Option 3 because you could have someone going along for 10, 12, 15 years, planning to be #2, and then all of a sudden, they're #1, and have a completely different set of skills coming to the fore, while losing a set they've relied on for a long time.

(This one seems to me to have a lot of potential for Bujoldian plotting techniques: i.e. "What's the worst thing that could happen to this character right now?")

And option 2 because it seems like it would shake social assumptions - would the personality traits common in oldest children tranfer? Probably not - so you could get someone with a typical last-child personality with the skills of #1, and thereby confuse or annoy people mightily. This one seems most fun if you want to play with social assumptions.

Option 1 seems most sensible if you want to tell a different sort of story entirely (not using either focus), and just want to get on with that.

I can see all three of them working, though the back story behind why they exist would need some varying or something.

[redbird]

Either of two:

The first, which I like better, is that if your immediately-older sibling dies before using their gifts and before you're born, you and any siblings after you move up once. If they're killed fighting trolls at the age of 12, or if they die of a fever at age 1 three days after you're born, you get the gifts you'd have gotten if you were still alive.

The second, which would make the world-building a bit more chaotic, is that the gods aren't consistent about this: If an older sibling dies, they sometimes leave everyone in their original birth order, sometimes do the valency thing, and sometimes move everyone up one. Or they might grab sibling number four, give her the powers of the dead sibling number 2, and move number six up to four while leaving five alone.

The latter would be gods who like to play dice, and might also lead to unprincipled people doing "experiments" by murdering random siblings from large families.

Also, either the "everybody moves up" model or the gods-randomize-stuff model creates new motives for murder. And for making very strong efforts to protect an older sibling who has known enemies, medical problems, or a tendency to take risks, by someone who wants to avoid losing their existing powers.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The gods in question are indeed pretty much jerks. So that's relevant.

[kemayo.livejournal.com]

How would this work, vis-a-vis bastards or second marriages? Do the powers accrue in sequence to the offspring of a particular couple, or is it tied to one of the parents?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Fathers don't matter for this, only mothers.

[sraun]

I like option 1, and I'd declare 'still-born counts' - what summons the god is the mother's labor, and whatever comes out gets gifted with the next power in sequence.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Whichever way it goes, it will not be that stillbirths don't "count." I've had too many friends who suffered through them to do it that way.

[secritcrush.livejournal.com]

I'm also fond of the idea that the powers get equally distributed amongst the rest of the living siblings when someone dies thereby adding a bit of incentive to kill them.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Alas, but they are not at all divisible powers.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I'd vote for 1 or 3, and I think 3 offers more interesting potential -- then you might find your role in life changing unexpectedly because an older sibling kicked it. (Depending on the awesomeness of these powers, you might even get siblings assassinating their elders so they can have a different one.) If not 3, then 1; 2 doesn't make much metaphysical sense in my head.

[blzblack.livejournal.com]

I agree that #3 sounds potentially more dynamic. Who am I really? This happened in Brit royalty a few times (you mean spiting sailor hick, riding around in the royal carriage giving rides to average joes, is going to be king?). Also there could be conflict of inner powers as these get shifted--perhaps the powers themselves get transmuted so that #2 doesn't exactly become #1 but 1.5 or 1.25 or....

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I think "everybody moves up when someone dies" would be the most interesting, because people could suddenly switch powers, and there's the potential for dramatic scenes in which someone suddenly can grow plants instead of setting fires, and realizes that his older sister must have died.

[zunger.livejournal.com]

These also create different incentives. #1 means that a family will often find itself in the position of "missing power #X" and so have weaknesses, need to contract with other families, etc. #3 creates some potentially nasty incentives for siblings, especially if elder siblings' powers are more interesting. #2 seems to dilute the effect of birth order significance considerably.

#1 also has some interesting implications when remarriage is involved. Is it birth order for that mother, that father, or for both as a couple? The social status of widows could be radically different as a function of which.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

As I said as regards an earlier comment, only the mother matters. But the rest of the social structure is not really disadvantageous for widows any more than for widowers -- if that much. Hmm. Yah, as I think of it, widowers are not really in a very good spot, but widows are fine.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

I chose the first one because, assuming the powers for #1 are more desirable than for subsequent kids, it adds all kinds of fun (for some odd value of fun) to the desire for heirs. All the stress you get in some societies over the need to have kids, and the desire for them to be male, gets heightened that way.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Don't make that assumption. The powers are not hierarchical. They're merely different.

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

Ack! Between you and your magical siblings and Bear's Amber/Gormenghast dynastic thingy, my brain is trying to grow things. Wicked brain spores.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Eat braaaaaains.

[talimena.livejournal.com]

I've no help for your question, but adore the image of elephant selkies. Not to mention the idea of you wandering your house hrrronnnnkk-ing.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Why not have the youngest rather than oldest as #1?

If not for this society, perhaps another in the same world -- close enough and easy enough to travel to/from that there are sometimes questions of which gods have jurisdiction over a particular family.

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

But what happens if there's another kid born? Do the powers shift?

[markgritter.livejournal.com]

I prefer the Alvin Maker model: the gift sticks with the person, but the sibling number is determined by those alive at birth.

Thus if sib #1 dies, sib #2 keeps his or her power. Sib #3 born after sib #1's death gets 2nd-child powers as well. The sib #4 gets the 3rd-child powers.

Thus to be the 7th son of a 7th son, all that is necessary is to have 6 older brothers at birth, not six older uncles--- just 6 uncles that were alive when your father was born.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

I like the idiosyncracy of option #2. Valence-based powers seem to work well with what you've said about these gods so far.

Also: What happens if someone manages to completely conceal that they had a kid (the entire process of pregnancy, etc.) from the gods? If they're not omniscient, I'm sure it's possible...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmm. See, any of these gifts have advantages and disadvantages, but the disadvantages are mostly personality based. "But I don't want to [do magic thing x]!" sort of thing. So it would be more along the lines of a disadvantage of having to conceal the kid from the gods for some other reason than something people would do on purpose to skip the gift.

Well, crud. Off I go typing notes again.

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

*reads comments* hmm, can I throw another variable into the list? When do the people get their birth-order gifts? From the moment of birth (wee babby setting fire to its crib) or from a certain age of majority or something? Because if you came into your power or whatever at age 7 or something, it might make things easier (assuming its the kind of society where dying young is pretty much the norm in families). And then you'd count, "siblings still alive when you reach 7". Would that work?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, these are from-birth powers, no firestarting included.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I find 3 most intuitive, and 1 most annoying because it feels the most static. But I voted for #2 precisely because I find it less intuitive.

All of them have plottiness and character growth implications. All. I can't vote for or against any of them on those counts, because I can see interesting things you could do with all of them. So I just vote on the basis of wackiness, which leads me to 2. (There's no such thing as 'objective wackiness.' It's the most wacky to /me/.)

[mamapduck.livejournal.com]

I clicked other because while I think option #1 is the most plausible and easiest to write consistently, I have a passion for the sheer chaos #2 that I suspect only other manic-depressives will completely get. #3 gives the ambitious ones good opportunity for offing sibs but it's soooooooooo passe. *Anybody* can write that kind of thing- royalty's been doing it for eons.

But that's just me and I've had too much caffeine today.

[greatestofnates.livejournal.com]

They could stack. If the oldest dies then the 2nd in line gets extra powers. That could get kind of Highlanderish. If somebody successfully fakes their death would the sibling get new powers?

It would be sweet if there was a Siamese twin that got double powers. A Siamese quadruplet arch-villain would rock too. Especially if he/she/they could look in all four cardinal directions at once and shoot lightning with their feet.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

There will be no lightning-shooting at this time. I am sorry to disappoint. Also, they're really fairly mutually exclusive powers, so having both at once -- especially with first- and secondborn -- is not really feasible.

[anne-mommy.livejournal.com]

I can't decide. Here are my thoughts:

Keeping just the powers you're given at your birth order would be like nothing else I've read before. And unlike the way things are handed down in the real world. On the other hand, the natural abilities that I have will not change based on whether or not my siblings live, because they are inherent to me and not based on inheritance.

But...having your abilities change upon something as traumatic (and dramatic) as the death of a sibling could offer up all kinds of possibilities. How would someone handle going from one set of abilities to another so quickly? It makes for a lot of possibilities. However, how is that different from princes who have found themselves king after the death of a sibling when it was not something they were raised for? I can think of a number. Of course, they are great stories...

I hope that made sense. I'm really tired.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

I voted for #1, 'cause it makes the most sense to me. Getting this magical gift at birth seems permanent to me, for whatever reason. And if child #x dies at birth, then child #x+1 gets the power of child #x+1.

[jsgbits.livejournal.com]

I lean towards #3 because it gives motif to greedy siblings who want certain specific powers.

Have you thought about some combination all three depending on the god? Since the gods aren't consistently reliable, they could be caprious. One god could "bless" his worshippers in a linear fashion. Another could bless the worshippers depending on who is living at the moment. Another could bless the moving-up sequence. Er, that might get complicated, but it could add another layer of social structure--why certain gods are connected to certain clans or regions, etc. I could also be taking this in a direction unlikely for your story.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, there are already regional variations in religious affiliation, so this might factor in later. Or it might not; I'm not sure what complications would arise from having to explain all of it. Hmmm.

[eileenlufkin.livejournal.com]

How did the gods agree on which gifts for which birth order? I like the idea of all the gods finally, with great difficulty, agreeing on the basic order, but each one doing something different for special cases.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is a very good question indeed. [scribblescribblescribble]