I'm currently scripting for a light novel and hentai doujinshi series, and I'm hitting something of a wall.

This feels like the right place to ask. If it isn't, please tell me.

If some kind of disaster wrecked the human genome and left us as monsters, cyborgs, or magic-based abominations, what kind of societal rules would pop up?

The artist who's so eager to do lineart and color on all of the frames has a real keen for the what_has_science_done tag, so that should give a general idea of the kind of creatures involved.

Normally, in sci-fi, when a disaster like this happens, there are a bunch of 'normal' people trying to fix the problem. We're assuming that the 'problem' has become the status quo, though I still don't know what the problem is.

This feels really vague, what have you got so far? It's hard to come with ideas for someone else's creation when there's very little to base it off.

I mean, is there conflict between the normals and the others? Is there outright war, or do people albeit maybe grudgingly accept that this is how things are? Do they keep to themselves and furthering the divide, or is it just a hotpot of potential drama and disaster waiting to happen? Is it set in a futuristic setting or more contemporary. Are all the others the same new "species" or are the a lot of variation? Are there little monster kids running around stealing scraps of food? Is the main conflict supposed to be their differences and is the goal to diminish or bridge those differences in the end? Is there a main character, and what are their goals supposed to be? Are they a normie or a monster? Do you want people to sympathize with one side or the other? Is one side inherently good or evil? Do most just want to live their lives and small groups stand for most of the conflict? Do they have a different culture, or language? And finally when you say societal rules, do you mean they are living side by side but there is segregation like "monsters must use monster drinking fountains"?

Note that I don't necessarily mean that you should answer these questions, it's just to show how little we know about your creation.

There's just too many ways this can go. It feels like you'd have an easier time getting feedback if you came up with actual specific plot elements and ask for feedback if that's a good idea or not, or what people would rather be interested in.

what an exciting question! But I gotta agree -- insufficient data!

Did everything change slowly or all at once? and if slowly, HOW slowly? changing in a few weeks is totalyl different than changing over 5 yearws or over 20 years.

what was the nature of the change? I mean, "and the bombs fell, and then we we re monsters" is different from "one day, it just... happened and we don't know why."

WHERE things are happening is also an interesting question.

Also, what else happened? I mean, did our pet dogs also turn into slobbering abominations? was there some sort of apocalypse at the same time and we're all focusing on trying to get enough to eat or did society mostly remain intact, just with more arms and tentacles?

Do we still make use of social media and the internet? ( I mean, this is a pretty neat thought: I would love to imagine the tumblr kids banding together and being super supporting of one another no matter HOW MANY arms you have, as long as you're not hurting other people, while the church moms are panicing because they've clearly done wrong by Jesus.)

And when are we saying this happened? I mean... if your protags are ... 22 now, and all this happened when they were 14, tha'ts totally different than if it happened to their grandparents.

people adapts pretty well. we adjsut to a new "normal" pretty quickly. Society can change and grow pretty dang fast. Consider how different society today is compared to that of 30 years ago.

Think about where you're starting. Think abut where you want to be. Figure out how to get there. For right now, you don't need to know if it was a genetic weapon, or an result of radiation, or a nanovirus or whatever: you gotta figure out if it's the result of human conflict, if it just happened. If it happened lifetimes ago, then maybe it doesn't matter. but like... if it was those dang Commies dropping Viro-bombs on the US in the 80's, then we probably have some interesting perspectives on international relationships. If this was the result of magic cone wrong in the 1880's, tha'ts a totally different story, where maybe only SOME peopel hold on to resentment over what the south did, while most peopel just accept it.

As well, what are your... thematic goals? I mean... is there fear of outside war? Is the fear the monster you've become? is the fear the monster that others are? There's just... so many questions and not enough direction here.

Thank you for all of your responses, and the issue is that we're writing in what was usually called "The Marvel Method".

I need to get enough plot and dialogue together to fill about half the book, then he'll fill in most of the key-frames with line-art, then we'll fine tune that last portion together (it used to be over the phone, but Google Hangouts is a lot more reliable.)

I've brought up the questions with my editor/artist, and the answers are as follows, from top to bottom:

1) There will be enough data, we'll provide you with more input.
2) An untold, uncaring force has altered everyone and everything into living things. Most of them are vaguely humanoid, and at least as smart as your average fry-cook, though some diverge radically from the usual evolutionary toolbox that humans got. While it's mostly humans mixed with other creatures, we occasionally get the person-made-entirely-of-genitals, or the mouths-everywhere creature.
2.5) The time-frame was a lightning-storm that covered the planet, but quickly dissipated. Now, everything is alive, sentient, and has a soul. Including every ant, every grain of sand, and every leaf of spinach. On the flip-side of that, ghosts are now a common occurrence, as are various undead, angels, demons, and fey.
3) Every religious pantheon's God(s) are willing to talk to us, though not everyone is willing to listen to them. None of them will take credit/blame for what happened to the world. Some of them openly reject fervent worshipers because they disagree with the message.
4) Because everyone who changed drastically is potentially a living weapon, there's racism / species-ism, but no open conflict between these groups.
5) The focus of the story is supposed to start out focused on characters in this world, but I can see how that may pale in comparison to these bigger issues.
6) Since much of social media is inherently deceptive and disruptive, a lot of the changed people would give up on the social networks, though they'd probably still be involved in the video networks so as to show off their new abilities and/or forms.
7) There's a clear dividing line at the age of 50 (for mortals), where people will turn into an undead for the following 50 years, before reincarnating.
8) Diseases no longer exist. Every type of disease either looks like a slime creature or a tentacle creature, and they can eat people, but can't make them sick. Depending on the type of illness, it might also spit the person out later, or might digest them. Then they become a ghost.
9) This has all been happening for an indeterminate amount of time, and that's intentional. If I laid down a minimum, I'd say 450 years, but probably a lot longer. Like this was a system that was intended to work differently, and it's missing a few key pieces. These are all people that have become comfortable with this world, and either stopped questioning it, or were never questioning it for some other reason. (This would be a late-chapter reveal, if it were ever revealed at all.)
10) CHARACTER IDEAS:: (Gendered pronouns are purely tentative here)
Protagonists:
A) Unchanged person researching the changed people, and trying to uncover what caused this. Whether or not there is an active cover up is unclear (I don't mean it's hazy, I mean my editor hasn't decided).
B) A deadly disease filled with remorse at its diet, since even if those people will eventually recover, they're still being horribly inconvenienced. It wants a way to change itself again, this time into something less destructive.
C) A person whose job it is to stop them from making these discoveries, whether it's because he's actually employed by a conspiracy, or the Gods, or if he's just crazy. The point would be that he gets too involved in the history, and decides it's worth helping them find the truth, even if he'll have to bury it later.

That's all of the answers I have for now, and I hope that you can all give me your opinions on these as the summary of my potential world. Thank you for giving me questions to work off, because that helped a lot. If I forgot any particular questions, please remind me and I'll answer it in the next post, as well as any new questions/ideas you may have.

Xonrokane_Xana said:
Thank you for all of your responses, and the issue is that we're writing in what was usually called "The Marvel Method".

The marvel method can work pretty great in some places, but when you're making a story--like, actually a book, with complex workld building, this doesn't work so well.

Stan lee could give general story ideas to the artists, because the artists already knew the world and the characters. They jsut had to fill in the details.

(for example. If I'm writing a Harry Potter story, we all know what happens when a character uses the Killing Curse. we know that it means that they're filled with hate, and if the spell hits the target, it will kill them. Because that's the rules of the world.)

Trying to do things the way you're doing it is jsut gonna lead to... well, how did you put it? "hitting something of a wall." :)

You gotta get the foundation down first. I'd love to tell you to separate the world from the plot, but you can't do that.

Okay.

Your protagonists all deal with the idea of dealing with The Change -- be it when it happened, why it happened, the effects of what happened. So the questions about history are important. Which is... a bit weird because 450 years is a long-ass time. 450 years ago is a MYSTERY to us today. 1568? we have a lot of history --wars in France,Mary, Queen of Scots, fleeing to England, the start of the 80 years' war . But not a lot of details. How DID someone in 1568 Scotland live? Not a lord, but a peasant? OR a member of the clergy? the world is FULL of modern historians looking at ancient history and interpreting it entirely the wrong way because they see it through modern eyes.

We read "peasants typically had dirt floors" and immediatly assume that they were tromping around in freshly turned garden soil.

Nope.

these earth floors were hard packed down -- by which I mean, people packing it down for HOURS on end until it was solid and firm.

And then we read that people covered the floor in rushes. And we imagine them strewing hay around. Like a barn.

Nope.

Rushes were a plant with long narrow leaves. They could be anywhere from a foot long to about 3 foot long. The leaves are probably about an inch wide or so. okay so they jsut dumped these on the floor, right?

Nope!

There's indication that they were woven into mats, or at least tied into bundles so that they weren't being kicked around randomly.

But, you know, it was so long ago, that we just.... assume... that it was dirt everywhere, full of grossness.

After all, they only bathed a few times a year, right?

Nope. (there is a lot of effort to paint those times as primitive and uncivilized. Most of it is ignorance, and and effort to contrast the "dark ages' to "modern times' ... and it's mostly all factually incorrect.)

anyway, my point is... 450 years ago is long enough ago that we modern people have NO IDEA what was going on back then. and generally, it's ancient history. it's gone.

That can be fine, for your story, but 450 years ago is basically too far away for your average person to care about. and that's fine. but keep that in mind.

anyway. YOu gotta build your world first before you can let your characters run loose in it.

And in order to build your world, you gotta have the general ide of what your story is. For example "After discovering an ancient artifact, protagonist bob finds himself questioning everything he knows about his world" expanding out into "he eventually discovers the truth, which was that it was a goat-conspiracy." and "along the way, he makes friends who help him." and "after, he'll decide he wants to destroy the goat overlords." and "but then he realizes as he breaks into the goat city that they're already dying out because of their own hubris" and "he discoverers he holds the secrets to fixing the Goat's genetic problems, and that the king of goats is actually not a bad guy, and has spent his life trying to improve the quality of life for all of humanity. Will protagBob let them all die? will he murder the goat king? will he try to save the goat king and all goat kind in the hopes that together they can make a better world for all to live in?"

and once you get something like THAT, you can build the world around it. Maybe you realize that goats shouldn't be the bad guy, but that it's the Antelopes. So yuo build your world around that. Once you have an idea of the world.... then you can set Protag Bob down and tell him to go. then you can write your plot, and your dialog, then you can draw your pictures and your finetuning.

but right now, you've got a bunch of paint and a canvas and the idea that you wanna draw something pretty with a doggy in it, but no idea where to start,m what color to grab, or even iof it's gonna be a corgi or a Great Dane.

2) An untold, uncaring force has altered everyone and everything into living things. Most of them are vaguely humanoid, and at least as smart as your average fry-cook, though some diverge radically from the usual evolutionary toolbox that humans got. While it's mostly humans mixed with other creatures, we occasionally get the person-made-entirely-of-genitals, or the mouths-everywhere creature.
2.5) The time-frame was a lightning-storm that covered the planet, but quickly dissipated. Now, everything is alive, sentient, and has a soul. Including every ant, every grain of sand, and every leaf of spinach. On the flip-side of that, ghosts are now a common occurrence, as are various undead, angels, demons, and fey.

Everything.

Well, I mean.. There are several religions that basically already believe that.

The Shinto religion is devoted to the worship of spirits and essences of all things. ALL things. Rocks, trees, rivers, places, people. The front step of your grandmother's house, where you sat, where your momma sat, where yoru grandmother sat, singing songs and playing in the sunlight... has an essence. Maybe it's not as strong as the essence of the temple where peopel have worshiped for 1000 years, but it IS. There's a spirit there.

It's not the only religion with these overtones in it.

3) Every religious pantheon's God(s) are willing to talk to us, though not everyone is willing to listen to them. None of them will take credit/blame for what happened to the world. Some of them openly reject fervent worshipers because they disagree with the message.

Okay, that's pretty neat. Tred carefully though.

4) Because everyone who changed drastically is potentially a living weapon, there's racism / species-ism, but no open conflict between these groups.

If there is racism, there is conflict. Especially if one type of thing holds any ability to restrict another.

That said, if there are "groups" of beings that look and act a like, they will probably group together, and human nature is to reject "others" that are not part of 'the group'.. so some "racial" conflict is likely. Especially, again, depending on the scope of the world:

If we live in villages and there is no real 'national news" or "international news" and we get most of our news from wordo f mouth or maybe the local newspapers or town criers or bards or merchants or whatever, then our world is very small. You defend your family first, then your village, then the neighboring village, then maybe the local duke and the king somewhere past that. The people from another country are far away and strange.

But if we live in a modern world... the internet is at our fingers. -- the attacking people from another country can share their grievances. The King must share his own. The history is available. we're aware of the displaced people of the third country that used to exist between us that we've destroyed. We can realize that they are humans like us, that they too love and have children and fight for what they love. In a more global society, we've been eating their cuisine for decades, we enjoy their music, and their clothing.

But I guess to wrap it back in to the topic at hand: It would be hard to speak for the world at large and say there is no conflict. There will always be conflict, especially if the world and flow of information is small, like it was when we were a less global society.

5) The focus of the story is supposed to start out focused on characters in this world, but I can see how that may pale in comparison to these bigger issues.

Nah, you can do it. but you gotta know what's going on behind the scenes. You gotta build the rules of your world. Don't let exposition ruin your story -- it totally can. No one wants to have a random 3 page info dump about history that doesn't matter in the middle of the story. What is important is that you know the histoy, and can write it's effects into the story.

6) Since much of social media is inherently deceptive and disruptive, a lot of the changed people would give up on the social networks, though they'd probably still be involved in the video networks so as to show off their new abilities and/or forms.

What?

I mean

what?

450 years passed. I don't know where social media fits into that.

Did... facebook happen, THEN the Change happened, then 450 years passed?
did.. the Change happen 450 years ago and people have invented facebook and moved on?

Did... I mena...

this honestly sounds like you just have a hate-on for social media o_o (which is not unreasonable, social media can be used to do a lot of bad things, but it's also done a lot of good things too. Humans. are. pack. animals. We want communities and in the era of social media, we have been more able than ever to find our "packs".

I mean, we're a buncha furries here. Talking about furry shit. Furry was one of my very first packs when i started trying to distance myself from my family--like all teenagers do. Packs are important. a fandom can be a pack. A pack is about belonging and common interests. the little LGBT+ kids are forming a pack online. little Trans and Ace kids and forming packs. packs are about being accepted and belonging.

you can be a part of many packs.

But I feel like... I mena... if we, in the real world, were suddenly all mutated tommorow afternoon. there would be use swaths of people reaching out to find other people "like them".

"I'm kind of reptile like i guess, and my arms are flaking, am I, like, shedding my skin?????"
"Probably yeah! You should probably try to drink a lot of water and take some long soaking bathes if you can. Make sure it's not to hot or too cold!"
"Oh that happened to me last week! If you have claws, make sure you don't scratch too much -- your new skin MIGHT be really soft and tender underneath for a few days! Mine was!"

especially people who are more unusual -- those rolling dick monsters are probably pretty isolated, and getting to talk with, say,the make with 12 diuck-ended tentacles would probably be pretty theraputic. This guy gets what it means to look like a rape-beast in a way that, say, the fangy maw-horror doesn't quite get.

Also, if 450 years have based, the 'novelty' of new abilities and forms is probably not really there so much.

7) There's a clear dividing line at the age of 50 (for mortals), where people will turn into an undead for the following 50 years, before reincarnating.

wat o_o

I mean, that's really neat, but also creepy and cool but also... well, I wonder if your'e trying to add too much to one plate. Just something to keep in mind!

50 years makes "living memory" a lot shorter -- 450 years ago is a LOT longer away. DO the undead still remember? are they .. like.. mindless zombies? or is it jsut.. another step of life?

if all memory and effective social interaction ends at 50, you're also cutting out a lot of the 'older wisdom' that humanity tends to develop on oldefr years.

(remember that whole thing about there beign a lot of misconceptions about the middle ages? the whole "we died at 30" thing was one of them. 30 is an AVERAGE life expectancy AT BIRTH. and a LOT of babies died early on. If you lived to be 5 or so, you were well likely to live to be 70 or 80.)

8) Diseases no longer exist. Every type of disease either looks like a slime creature or a tentacle creature, and they can eat people, but can't make them sick. Depending on the type of illness, it might also spit the person out later, or might digest them. Then they become a ghost.

*slow blink*

A disease is a disorder of structure or function within an animal or plant, that produces specific signs of symptoms.

I have diabetes. Diabetes is a disease. My diabetes is caused because my red blood cells ado not respond properly to to the insulin my body creates. My cells are insulin resistant. There is no organism that caused this. It is a result of my genetics being predisposed to developing insulin resistance.

Type 1 diabetics do not produce insulin anymore. This, too, is a genetic issue, not the result of an organism.

Many diseases do not have a organism-based cause.

Bacteria and viruses--which cause many other diseases and illnesses-- are everywhere. many cannot affect humanity and there are many bacteria that are beneficial. Our digestive tract has a large amount of bacteria in it that helps us digest food. If we removed all of our bacteria, we would die.

If bacteria no longer existed, many things could no longer digest. things would not rot--from animals, to leaves and everything in between. wounds would no longer get infected.

I like the *idea* of there being "sickness spirits" ... but saying "diseases no longer exist" is going down a path that will probably make some of your more science-y readers go "wait WHAT????"

9) This has all been happening for an indeterminate amount of time, and that's intentional.

Fair. Then most of the details of what happened when tehe change happened doesn't matter and you need to focus more on how you want the world to be shaped now.

If I laid down a minimum, I'd say 450 years, but probably a lot longer. Like this was a system that was intended to work differently, and it's missing a few key pieces. These are all people that have become comfortable with this world, and either stopped questioning it, or were never questioning it for some other reason. (This would be a late-chapter reveal, if it were ever revealed at all.)
10) CHARACTER IDEAS:: (Gendered pronouns are purely tentative here)
Protagonists:
A) Unchanged person researching the changed people, and trying to uncover what caused this. Whether or not there is an active cover up is unclear (I don't mean it's hazy, I mean my editor hasn't decided).

How is there an unchanged person? o_o

ifg everyone and EVERYTHING changed... ???

I just got a full-change in assignment from my editor/artist.

Apparently, we're (by which I mean the editor. I just lost that job, see below.) not going to be doing any of this as a full novel. The world building is going to be done piecemeal, scrapped one fragment at a time as an alternate history of the world with fables, and their characters, as reality. I have no idea what that means, but if he can't keep an idea going for a week, I'm glad to be rid of him.

(I got re-assigned to a different chair, but he still needs me to do other things. Mostly doing historical checking against the Aarne-Thompson Uther Tale Type Index)

That said, I'd still like to flesh out this world, possibly write a full book myself. The responses that I have, since I'm no longer running back to my editor:

Aurel Response
I started out asking about societal roles, since that seemed like the first thing that would come up. You have all proven that assumption to be very short-sighted.

My former editor wants to create an alternate history version of this world, where there would have been these strange creatures (name currently undefined) for centuries.
My plan was to still have wreckage, monuments, artwork, and historical records of a time when humans were the dominant species on the planet.
Either way, the idea was to have a current era wherein we had these creatures (name currently undefined.)
Destroying the world is a good idea, though. I'll take it under consideration.

While I hadn't considered the necessary implications of alterations to these people during trying political times (partially because I was aiming toward the future, and not an alternate history), it is likely to set the stage for political stagnation or reversion, the same way that the modern world has just evolved its own caste system via class stratification and its own versions of feudalism with corporate arbitration. While I can't speak for my editor, I'm going to play with these, and see if we can have a few of them interacting together. (Even if it's not open war, watching them try to act diplomatic should be interesting when the new castes and social classes are probably built off of species variation.)

If I take the alternate history route, I think that the mid-1930s-1940s would be a good recommendation, especially because it had the largest amount of recorded experimental surgery and intentional infection, thank you. It would mean that the 'purist' groups had already begun their death march, and these creatures would be looked upon as either surgical fodder, living weapons, or liabilities. (If you grew claws and fangs, you'd probably want to eat the guy who'd been planning on killing you.)

I would jump on the bizarre prosthesis theory from WWI, but like I said, I'm no longer bound by my artist. Though I am looking into hiring an artist of my own if the book sells reasonably.

I would like to see how the Gods interact with the world, but I think they'd end up disillusioned rather quickly, especially once the atom is split. The intent of their being in the story (I think) was to give a red herring on the mystery of what caused all of this. I'm now considering scrapping it from here, and throwing it into a big pile of other ideas that will be used later.

The Gods existing was supposed to confirm that everything has a soul, but also that it (death) matters less, since the afterlife and reincarnation both exist. There is minimal guilt over eating things, but more guilt over hurting them beyond what you need.
A potential mitigating factor there would be if creatures could heal faster, and more completely, now, than they did before, thus making the lost body parts a minor inconvenience.

Okay, I think the idea with diseases was to create an inlet for slime boys and slime girls, and I'm abandoning the "eating people" (and that potential creepiness) aspect of it, in favor of the slimes feeding off of fluids. There would still be occasions of slimes latching onto people, but that would be like a hungry puppy licking you, not an anaconda eating you.

This world is going to be weird enough that tentacle creatures don't need a separate line.

(When did I list fake news? I didn't see it.)

This has ceased to be a simple question. I am attempting to smooth out the rough edges of an idea that I was given, and that sounded enticing. He's not going to use it, so I'm trying to make it better.

If I set this in the modern day, I'm definitely going to include the conspiracy theorists on social media, even if the ideas they list are completely insane.

SnowWolf Response 2:

Your protagonists all deal with the idea of dealing with The Change -- be it when it happened, why it happened, the effects of what happened. So the questions about history are important.

I think that, between your and Aurel's replies, I'm going to cut the listed time down. Rather than operating on an assumption of the distant future, or the Dark Ages, I'm going to set a timeline in which this all started happening in the mid 1800s, around the US Civil War. That should give us (me) an easier time imagining the world in question, and how the physical changes will alter history and politics for those eras. Then the current world for the book will be either modern day, or shortly thereafter (an era with VR and augmented reality that is more complex than the Oculus and Google Glass.)

I'm working on the rules for the world, and that's what this thread has quickly become. A sounding board for potentially useful ideas, and also a good place for people to tell me that my ideas are stupid and won't work. (I'm not complaining. If you folks didn't tell me that, I'd have to hear it from my publisher, and it's easier to fix the ideas at this early stage.)

I do think I have an outline built:
01_Pro (the protagonist) is working in the archives at a data storage company.
02_Pro can't go outside before or after certain times because, as an unaltered human, she is effectively prey to the altered creatures.
03_Pro starts to look for what might explain why her family isn't changed, even though so many others are.
04_Pro learns about the experiments performed in the past, and decides to tell everyone about how the ruling group is descended from war criminals.
05_Pro goes on TV and radio with this information, but is med with disbelief.
06_Pro is brought written (and sometimes verbal, from the people who experienced them) accounts of how those changes felt to people at the time, and how it changed their lives.
07_Pro is slipped information about a separate conspiracy. Not a cover-up, like before, but an attempt to re-enact the same circumstances, and effectively ravage the entire planet with a new set of changes.
08_Pro would need to decide whether or not to let this happen. If it happened, she wouldn't need to be human anymore. She'd be complicit in a horrific war-crime, and be just like the people she claimed to despise, but she wouldn't have to be human.
09_Depending on the decisions in 08, this is where I'd explain how all of those chips fell.

I think I'm going to restrict the other-ization of people to "the changed"(now the predominant form of life) and "humans" (since they were sentient without being changed by an outside force)
The conflict between internal divides (snakes vs. mongooses) will be existent, but will occur less drastically than in prior decades or centuries. Unchanged humans will be enough of a rarity that they'll either exist as second-class citizens, or exist in a "gilded cage", where everything that props them up robs them of agency.

I think my listing for a timeline in the above paragraph answers most of your lines about point 6. And yeah, I do have something of a hate-on for social media, though that hasn't stopped me from using it.

Step 06_ in the outline above was heavily influenced by your declaration about humanity as packs. That entire portion is probably going to be spent in faux-interviews with the people from this world, with our protagonist trying to understand them, and trying not to jump out of her skin, since she's been trained to think that she's prey to them, and doesn't know which of them consider themselves 'predatory'.

Point 7... this one probably sounded really cool in his head, but here's what I think it means (I guarantee his version is different, and I don't care.)
A) People have an active expiration date. Any of "the changed" are going to die at 50. That's part of the animosity between the changed majority and the human minority. These people keep their memories, and it's not hard to keep things together as an undead when you're of humanoid intelligence.
B) At minimum, their heart stops beating (Zombie, Vampire, Lich). At maximum, they become something wildly undead (Ghost, Wraith, Skeleton).
C) They will reincarnate, leading them on an endless cycle. This follows the Hindu "Samsara", wherein your deeds define how far up or down your soul gets tossed on the ladder, though the 'humans' on that ladder are all anthropomorphic, not literal humans. As with the theorized reincarnation of Hindu and Buddhism, memories of past lives are recoverable, but difficult (and I'd definitely leave it out of my first book unless it was a plot point.)

Okay, we misspoke on the disease thing earlier. It's pretty clear now that he was talking about microbes, not all diseases. Functional disorders (heart disease, clots, diabetes, and the like) would still exist. Viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites were the "slime creatures" and "tentacle monsters" in question.

If I'm keeping that idea, only the dangerous ones would be made into sentient monsters. The smaller, mostly harmless ones would be unchanged.

Cancer would create an interesting sub-plot, if it were able to separate from its host and potentially function separately from them. It raises interesting questions.

I'm hoping that any Neil DeGrasse Tyson types would recognize this as super-soft sci-fi. It's effectively a fantasy story, and while I would like the actions of the people to be believable, I don't think it can be judged by any scientific standard.

I think I issued enough explanation/redaction about the fact that not EVERYONE changed, and that this is the new cause of social strife.

Hoping to hear back soon... again!

Xonrokane_Xana said:
I just got a full-change in assignment from my editor/artist.

Apparently, we're (by which I mean the editor. I just lost that job, see below.) not going to be doing any of this as a full novel. The world building is going to be done piecemeal, scrapped one fragment at a time as an alternate history of the world with fables, and their characters, as reality. I have no idea what that means, but if he can't keep an idea going for a week, I'm glad to be rid of him.

My 'red alert' buttons are going off.

I don't know who these folks are, but be careful what yu get involved with them with. These feels like the sort of project you put weeks or months into and never get paid.

Also, as a life-long reader, roleplayer, storyteller, editor and author... That seems like a bad way to do world building. That is how you world build yourself into a corner. It can work-- if your'e willing to go back and adjust things around--something you can do as long as stuff hasn't been published already, but... My and most of my author friends agree: if part of your story's focus IS the complicated world, you need to have the rough outline of the world there.

or it can jsut be hentai where, y'know, the rules are what the rules are because it sounds like sexy fun.

That said... . Idon't know how long you guys have been working on this idea.... but it can take time to brainstorm and idea out to it's best form. I've been working on one of my settings for about 3-4 years (casually.)

(I got re-assigned to a different chair, but he still needs me to do other things. Mostly doing historical checking against the Aarne-Thompson Uther Tale Type Index)

*blinks*

I also really don't... like how you were reassigned but "still needed" .... this feels really.... mmm.... adversarial.

also what the hell do you need a Motif Index for? o_o

That said, I'd still like to flesh out this world, possibly write a full book myself.

Be careful. You don't want to get in trouble for stealing a setting, or intellectual property and whatnot.

I would like to see how the Gods interact with the world, but I think they'd end up disillusioned rather quickly, especially once the atom is split. The intent of their being in the story (I think) was to give a red herring on the mystery of what caused all of this. I'm now considering scrapping it from here, and throwing it into a big pile of other ideas that will be used later.

The Gods existing was supposed to confirm that everything has a soul, but also that it (death) matters less, since the afterlife and reincarnation both exist. There is minimal guilt over eating things, but more guilt over hurting them beyond what you need.

There are other ways you can play with that -- "we know that even the animals and plants we eat have souls and feelings. We know because..." a) "one day, over 10,000 people come forward around the world and said that it was true. They knew things they shouldn't. They told us secrets about ourselves." b) Every 10 years, for one day, we can understand everything. The trees enjoying the sun, it's leaves singing praises to the sun through thousands of unseen mouths. The rabbits in the grass, the grass, the fox in the shadows. It's beautiful, but traumatizing." c) "Some people can talk to them. Dunno why. But Plant-speakers work in most farms these days, encouraging plants to grow tall and strong, and acting as the voice of the plants against the unethical farmer wanting to harvest too soon. It works out pretty well, actually: With the promise that their seeds will be planeted, the plants can spend more of their energy on growing the parts of them that we want to eat." or... similar. miraculous things don't need a god visibly at the helm.

Also I am currently in love with the idea people speaking to plants for purposes of agricultural benefit. "Oh those? Yes, we're done with those ones. you can have them." "oh no, not that one, sunshine. I'm putting my best seeds in that one."

*files that one away for later*

A potential mitigating factor there would be if creatures could heal faster, and more completely, now, than they did before, thus making the lost body parts a minor inconvenience.

Or a good reason to, for example, kidnap some being, keep them in your basement and just... eat them slowly. D:

If I set this in the modern day, I'm definitely going to include the conspiracy theorists on social media, even if the ideas they list are completely insane.

Just be gentle with it and try not to target any particular group too much with it -- There is nothing that sucks the joy out of a book than reading something and feeling like the author is making fun of you and your beliefs, or worse, getting up on a soap box to, mid book, to tell everyone how evil you are.

(but the extremists are probably fair game. :P )

I think that, between your and Aurel's replies, I'm going to cut the listed time down. Rather than operating on an assumption of the distant future, or the Dark Ages, I'm going to set a timeline in which this all started happening in the mid 1800s, around the US Civil War. That should give us (me) an easier time imagining the world in question, and how the physical changes will alter history and politics for those eras. Then the current world for the book will be either modern day, or shortly thereafter (an era with VR and augmented reality that is more complex than the Oculus and Google Glass.)

Well, keep in mind that with something like 'the change' going on, everything that happened after will be wildly different. I mean... if everyone has been 'monsters' for over a generation, would WW2 have really occured the same way? I mean... using US history here, again: Women got the right to vote around 1920. When everyone is different, can old ideas of sexism really still be held? How about ideas of racism? Jim crow laws spawned somewhere in the post-civil war era and were held until the 1950's and 1960's. (mostly. Racism is still very alive in modern america, but that's quite off topic. mostly.) ... would we really have gotten caught up in the space race or have technology at the same place it currently is?

I honestly thing changing history is a complicated and complex idea... It's easy to start at a point and diverge through there, but trying to get everything to line up ti a modern-day level of technology is.... tricky. You'll have advances in some places, and others where we've never advanced. I mean.. imagine what the car would look like if most people don't come in a standard-human-shape anymore.

It's nto to say that it can't be done.

and a lot of Japanese stuff tends to hand wave away the back history of things and they operate off of the rules that "This is how the world is, because we say that this is how it is." and they don't need to explain things like that. and tha'ts okay.

)

So... you MIGHT do better trying to imagine what you want the world to be like and building off from there. I wouldn't worry about having things like YEARS listed. no one cares if it's 2018, or 2118 probably. if you have augmented reality, then you do. (if you want homework edition, think about why AR helps your STORY along and what it needs to do. extras credit for looking into what technologies go into making AR and following what kinda technology comes out from there... but there will be some people who go RAWWWRR when, say, ... to oversimplfy... you skip a step in the tech tree without an obvious reason. Like... saying that the first monitors were sleek LCD and we skipped the big CRT stage. Or if we make flying cars without having wheeled cars. Those are bad examples, but you get what I mean. you don't generally have to go too crazy with it, but make sure that your technogy is not running marathons without being able to crawl. :)

(Sourse: I once thought about writing an alternative history story where a certain type of technology was never invented/developed (something like radio/satallite, something liek that. the intention was to hinder 'pocket cameras' and surveillance technology, but that story died out quickly, because I was goign to need a degree in the history off engineering or something like that.)

I'm working on the rules for the world, and that's what this thread has quickly become. A sounding board for potentially useful ideas, and also a good place for people to tell me that my ideas are stupid and won't work. (I'm not complaining. If you folks didn't tell me that, I'd have to hear it from my publisher, and it's easier to fix the ideas at this early stage.)

The best rule I learned: sometimes you have to let go of your babies. But sometimes it's okay to fight for them :) Writing is hard :) sounds like you're approaching this from the right mindset though!

I do think I have an outline built:
01_Pro (the protagonist) is working in the archives at a data storage company.
02_Pro can't go outside before or after certain times because, as an unaltered human, she is effectively prey to the altered creatures.
03_Pro starts to look for what might explain why her family isn't changed, even though so many others are.
04_Pro learns about the experiments performed in the past, and decides to tell everyone about how the ruling group is descended from war criminals.
05_Pro goes on TV and radio with this information, but is med with disbelief.
06_Pro is brought written (and sometimes verbal, from the people who experienced them) accounts of how those changes felt to people at the time, and how it changed their lives.
07_Pro is slipped information about a separate conspiracy. Not a cover-up, like before, but an attempt to re-enact the same circumstances, and effectively ravage the entire planet with a new set of changes.
08_Pro would need to decide whether or not to let this happen. If it happened, she wouldn't need to be human anymore. She'd be complicit in a horrific war-crime, and be just like the people she claimed to despise, but she wouldn't have to be human.
09_Depending on the decisions in 08, this is where I'd explain how all of those chips fell.

TThis is pretty deep for what I assuemd would be a hentai story lol tha'ts not a bad thing-- people remember stuff with stories more than mindless fap material.

That said, This is pretty neat. I'ts hard to have a lot of opinion on it because there's so much of the story that's not touched over here. keeping good pacing is important, You want things to be exciting and building to a climax... it's hard to tell how much this will happen with the outline though :) But soudns pretty neat :D

I think I'm going to restrict the other-ization of people to "the changed"(now the predominant form of life) and "humans" (since they were sentient without being changed by an outside force)
The conflict between internal divides (snakes vs. mongooses) will be existent, but will occur less drastically than in prior decades or centuries. Unchanged humans will be enough of a rarity that they'll either exist as second-class citizens, or exist in a "gilded cage", where everything that props them up robs them of agency.

Just step carefully. No matter what, you've got an analogy for racism here and there's basically no way to get around that. Just try to avoid anything that project one side or the other as "good and pure" versus "mean and scary" with no variation or depth. I'd reccommend making sure that yoru protag's skin color, if mentioned, is of passing footnote, and that you're not, like, repeatedly over emphasizing her pristine lily white angelic flawless porcelain skin. ;) (Many of the characters from Harry potter never have skin colors detailed!)

I think my listing for a timeline in the above paragraph answers most of your lines about point 6. And yeah, I do have something of a hate-on for social media, though that hasn't stopped me from using it.

Just remember that for some people, it absolutly is a wonderful thing that has done great things for them.

Step 06_ in the outline above was heavily influenced by your declaration about humanity as packs. That entire portion is probably going to be spent in faux-interviews with the people from this world, with our protagonist trying to understand them, and trying not to jump out of her skin, since she's been trained to think that she's prey to them, and doesn't know which of them consider themselves 'predatory'.

Nice :) Just make sure that i'ts not one blob of disclosure. :D

Point 7... this one probably sounded really cool in his head, but here's what I think it means (I guarantee his version is different, and I don't care.)
A) People have an active expiration date. Any of "the changed" are going to die at 50. That's part of the animosity between the changed majority and the human minority. These people keep their memories, and it's not hard to keep things together as an undead when you're of humanoid intelligence.
B) At minimum, their heart stops beating (Zombie, Vampire, Lich). At maximum, they become something wildly undead (Ghost, Wraith, Skeleton).
C) They will reincarnate, leading them on an endless cycle. This follows the Hindu "Samsara", wherein your deeds define how far up or down your soul gets tossed on the ladder, though the 'humans' on that ladder are all anthropomorphic, not literal humans. As with the theorized reincarnation of Hindu and Buddhism, memories of past lives are recoverable, but difficult (and I'd definitely leave it out of my first book unless it was a plot point.)

This could definetly be neat, though, again, make sure you're being respectful to Samsara -- one person's neat plot point can be another person's religion :)

But that's pretty neat.... though it feels a bit weird for something that is usually "eternal" to have an expiration date. but I admit, I love vampires and stuff :P

Just make sure that you don't express anything like "and humans are the purest and more gentle of beings" or anything :) a lot of the ins and outs of reincarnation could probably be generally unknown to everyone... and probably a secret. Or maybe... one of those things that, well, some people believe, some don't, some aren't sure.. .etc.

I also dunno about straight up 'expiration date' thing. Seems like you could have soome fun with it, especially based off of a Hindu religious concept (dunno weather this is a case of "they've been right the whole time" or just "inspired by").. maybe there's some indeterminate insubstantial something that means some turn faster, some stay longer.. some might think that it's a result of living a good life, though maybe they don't agree what a 'good life is' ("I have these teeth and claws and can blend in with my surroundings.... am I not meant to be the finest predator I can be?") ("I shall fight against my desires to devour flesh and master my more monsterous urges") ("I will help others, those who are less fortunate and weaker than I am.") ("I will eat those weaker than I am to make the whole of us stronger.")

And others believe it's stress based. Or emotional. Or energy based. ("Everyone only has so much spirit within them... when we run out, we change again.")

Or maybe if the change allows peopel to keep their minds, maybe it's jsut seen as part of life, like puberty or menopause.. .then I figure i'd might be pretty traumatizing if your body changes forms or function. I mean... zombie penis monster?how would THAT work?

ultimately, what does this bring to your world, if they basically stay the same?

(also, more personally, with many religion and cultures--including Bengali--ghosts tend to be the spirits of people who's access to the cycle has been disrupted. They can't move on to join the usual cycle... so... it feels a little... weird.)

Okay, we misspoke on the disease thing earlier. It's pretty clear now that he was talking about microbes, not all diseases. Functional disorders (heart disease, clots, diabetes, and the like) would still exist. Viruses, bacteria, fungi, and parasites were the "slime creatures" and "tentacle monsters" in question.

Could work as logn as it's not, like... ALL bacteria do this. liek I said, bacteria are pretty basic to the functioning of most species. :) but I like the idea of like... this particular colony somehow transcending it's self and becoming a massive entity of slime-spirit. Not to much "a blob of e.coli" but "a powerful e.coli spirit" ...

If I'm keeping that idea, only the dangerous ones would be made into sentient monsters. The smaller, mostly harmless ones would be unchanged.

no such thing ;) E. Coli, for example, is found in the lower intestine of most warm blooded organisms. MOST strains (like.. god breeds) are harmless, but some cause food poisoning. you have e.coli in you right now. They actually produce vitamin K2 (Vitamin K helps with blood coagulation and calcium binding to the bones. K1 is mostly in leafy green veggies... and our gut bacteria (including E. coli) convert K1 into K2.) ... about 1% of your gut flora is e.coli actually :)

it's all... relative, I mean. e.coli isn't malicious, it's jsut doing it's thing. most bacteria and stuff are. parasites are usually jsut... little animals. (here is a link to one of my favorite parasites Sleep tight!) ... they're just doing things.

There's not really any maliciousness involved. Just little bacterial cows grazing away at that single leaf of spinach <3

Viruses are... a bit different, but I'm not really qualified to talk about it. (or any of this honestly. I have a lot of google-fu and random knowledge. Haven't looked up viruses recently. But I know that they're capital-W Weird and that there's some debate on if a virus is even technically alive? (okay, I looked at and it's like... living things have certain criteria like reproducing, and cell structure, and viruses don't meet ALL of those... just some of them.)

Cancer would create an interesting sub-plot, if it were able to separate from its host and potentially function separately from them. It raises interesting questions.

Definetly.

and... yeah. I mean.. I'm imagining grandma getting cancer and everyone waiting grimly with shotguns, swords and claws for the day It Happens. Hopefully she lives that long. If she does, hopefully she survives the aftermath. but everyone's done their best to keep her strong... even knowing that it'll just make the fight harder when it happens. But they're better folk than the people on the other side of the holler. They just tossed Ol' Jess out when the swelling started. They still see him sometimes, roaming through the hills. They keep hoping someone will happen by and put him out of his misery, but, well... It's probably going to have to be them. They just hope it won't be when Grandma's cancer blooms...

I'm hoping that any Neil DeGrasse Tyson types would recognize this as super-soft sci-fi. It's effectively a fantasy story, and while I would like the actions of the people to be believable, I don't think it can be judged by any scientific standard.

Oh sure, just... people know about things. and it's always aNnoYiNg when someone gets things You Know About Wrong. Like, I had a roleplaying character who was in the Air force, at once time. I did a lot of research into how rank structure works, promotion times, and general customs. I would make any military dude GROAN at how inaccurate I am in places -- but I, in turn, get really pissy when I see people doing things like "General Foxton was (way too young) years old. He'd gotten his rank after his rank after his amazing performance in (country we're haven't had troops in for 20 years), where he did (job an officer would never ever do because the military doesn't work that way). He'd gotten injured during an ambush where he had been (doing thing that an officer would never do, and that someone doing the prior job would never do.)"

I mean, if my casual research can find all of those details out for a roleplaying character of no importance, an author should spend 5 minutes to figure out that a man of that age, in the modern military, on a modern earth, would not be a colonel much less a General. (things were a bit different back during other, older wars)

This is a thing a lot of people experience. Doctors complain that medical shows/movies are inaccurate, programmers complain that hacking and programming and anything "computery" is generally done wrong in TV shows and it's ~annoying~ to see.

That said, bacteria and viruses and stuff is pretty 10th grade biology, so while i really do LIKE the idea, the details around probably ought to change a little to be more 'science'.

Allllso, this page should help you point more towards your genre -- soft-scifi probably applies, but.. scifi--even soft scifi-- generally has some focus on the scientific aspects of it. Star Wars, for example, is actually a Space Opera. That said, I do get what you mean: this isn't hard scifi -- but, like I said, handwave over how the force works and how hyperspace travel works -- not over 10th grade biology :)

I think I issued enough explanation/redaction about the fact that not EVERYONE changed, and that this is the new cause of social strife.

Hoping to hear back soon... again!

sounds like fun :D

Do you know of Shadowrun perhaps? It has a very simmilar premise.

I'm not sure if my employer has an actual plan at this point. His lack of consistency and direction keeps giving me that impression that I'll have my name attached to a project like "The Room", by Tommy Wiseau. Even so, the checks from the publisher have all cleared, so I'm definitely getting paid, at least for my work so far.

The "This is Fables" construct is probably going to have malleable, easily ignored or inverted rules for the sake of the hentai that he wants to draw. When I mentioned the phrase 'Eat Me When I'm Fatter' (That's a fable category. Specifically, one where a predator gets promised a bigger meal if he's patient, but usually then gets tricked somehow. The Billy Goats Gruff is a good example of that story.) he lit up at the thought of potential vore scenes.

I'm going to work on my story, with the focus on the Protagonist, and change things as issues pop up. I'm really glad that you guys have been here to provide questions and necessary kicks to my ego, but I think I have an idea of a world figured out. I'm still working on how, but I think a big part of the fetishization of this kind of world comes from the variety, and if the changed are durable enough to treat it like a playground, then I can keep the audience grounded with an unchanged character, as well as create some necessary plot from that.

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The Index... This is where it's important to explain that, while I'm assigned to this artist, and while I call him my employer because I'm following his orders most of the time, I'm technically employed by his publisher, not by him. They assigned him an assistant to keep him on task. When he needed a script writer, I was a script writer. When he decided he didn't need a script writer, my most important job became making sure he still had 'a project'. He might want me scripting something else by next week, or I might end up fetching coffee. It pays the same, so I'll do whatever job I'm assigned (within reason).

The Aarne-Thompson Uther Index is used to categorize fables, and he's using it to cobble simple scenarios based on those old stories. Little red riding hood as a prostitute; Three Little Pigs as BBW girls; even Pinocchio, but as a real-doll. He's using that to take the simpler scenarios, and create more complex stories. My job is mostly to report back on how much he's working. That project just got a lot simpler, but he left all the pieces behind of his old idea, and I plan on building something less insane out of the toys he threw away.

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On a less suspicious, or harsh-sounding note, while I wouldn't want to 'steal' the setting, he *was* going to throw it away. I'll offer to buy it. I'm going to the publisher to clear this as a distinct setting, since I know I can write my proof copy (First three chapters, synopses, and an overall story plan) before January. I'm going to offer him a portion of the commission up-front if it gets a release as a light novel or the like.

Also, I know he didn't copyright any part of this. Not yet, at least. The rights would belong to the publisher, and that's why I'm going to them. I'm sure they'd rather have a published book from his wasted week than his pile of used papers.
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I was considering what to do with the people who have become part plant. I'd say that the first few learned to speak to plants because they were either brought 'up' to being sentient, from being either vegetative or microbial, or because they were brought 'down' from being human into being part plant. They would learn to speak to plants just like learning a new language, and then a religion of people would start trying to learn, followed by the tinkerers, who want to understand the plants for science, or money.

The specifics on that would make for an interesting diversion, or a storyline for a separate book, since doing this kind of world-building is just begging to have me throw more than one poor protagonist through the wringer in it.

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Or a good reason to, for example, kidnap some being, keep them in your basement and just... eat them slowly. D:

I honestly hadn't thought of that. It makes me uncomfortable, but I'm going to consider that as a potential route for the antagonist. I'm getting disturbing flashbacks to Jeffrey Dahmer. Anyone else?
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I'm pretty sure I can come up with enough fictional villains that I don't need to pull in any additional ones from the real world. That is a good reminder though. Most of us do get on our soapboxes when we're writing fiction, trying to create utopian and dystopian meta-commentaries on the world.

I was thinking of the people listing alternate, probably species-ist, theories for why so many people have changed into these new forms. As well as the usual chestnuts: "We were never on the moon, the aliens abducted me, the Earth is a flat disc sitting on seven golden pillars set out by God." The comedy would ensue when God calls in to hassle that guy about how he tried that, and it didn't work, so he "went with a sphere that's flying through an endless void filled with gaseous titans of dangerous mass, huge rogue galaxies, and utter emptiness, chasing a nuclear explosion." It still sounds crazy, but it's less crazy.

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I don't think racism is off-topic for this story. The Changed would be looked upon as superior, with humans being looked at as inferior. Most humans, those that didn't want to leave their place in society, would have faced the same kind of redlining that kept minorities outside of gentrified neighborhoods in the 20th century. WW2 was led ideologically by the Nazis, but was really a demonstration of Fascist armies (the Axis) versus Capitalists, Traditionalists, and Communists. The same supremacist ideology would come through from somewhere, and it would see most of the humans put into concentration camps.

In US History, we'd see segregatory laws based less on old resentment or antebellum superiority (what they were couched in for their full century or so), and instead because you'd need to accommodate for the wild differences in biology. Old ideas of sexism might well evaporate, but something new would pop up in its place. The US would see gender reform somewhere just after the change, probably while everyone was still determining what they are/were, and what steps to take now. Women's suffrage would be a given, though the definition of what a 'woman' is would be muddied at best.

The Governmental Space Race was a product of US-Russia rivalry, and would likely not happen in this alternate history. There could still be a private one, especially since they might have the option to use people who were less-flammable or less-capable-of-suffocating. (This would be the part of this history where sentient microbes, Slime People, really shine)

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The automobile probably wouldn't be an international symbol anymore, especially for those people who can fly under their own power.

The re-arranging of the history is something that I'd do first, built around the protagonist and her family, and the events that affected them, then build outward. Fine-tuning everything would take a very long time, but I wouldn't need to do it all.

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In re-reading the scenario you put forth about the person becoming a snake, it does raise the question not only of what this was like for an older society, that was living in the frontier or mid-revolution(s) Europe and China, but also what it would look like all over the world if this happened today.

I think that, if I set this all in modern day, I wouldn't have most of these things as plot centerpieces, the same way that most modern homes don't have an Amazon Echo or Google Home. A state that is surveillance-heavy is usually good for a conspiracy-driven mystery, but unless I were to somehow pin all of this on VR or AR, they don't have a place as major players.

The most important aspect of the story would be having a complete record of history from the Change to the present day. That could be accomplished by a librarian with old paper records, as long as they were persistent and they found all of the proper connecting lines.

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TThis is pretty deep for what I assuemd would be a hentai story lol tha'ts not a bad thing-- people remember stuff with stories more than mindless fap material.
That said, This is pretty neat. I'ts hard to have a lot of opinion on it because there's so much of the story that's not touched over here. keeping good pacing is important, You want things to be exciting and building to a climax... it's hard to tell how much this will happen with the outline though :) But soudns pretty neat :D

While I am writing what will be dime-store fap material, I always try to ensure that the stories I write are engaging and well-written. While I've never felt shame at writing about sex, violence, or the darkest embers of human madness, I refuse to write something of inferior quality. If I'm writing porn, I'm going to write the BEST porn. That's something I learned from Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie.

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Just step carefully. No matter what, you've got an analogy for racism here and there's basically no way to get around that. Just try to avoid anything that project one side or the other as "good and pure" versus "mean and scary" with no variation or depth. I'd reccommend making sure that yoru protag's skin color, if mentioned, is of passing footnote, and that you're not, like, repeatedly over emphasizing her pristine lily white angelic flawless porcelain skin. ;) (Many of the characters from Harry potter never have skin colors detailed!)

The passing thoughts I had about the protagonist's skin color were to either not mention it at all, or to make it an actual clue that she'd missed completely. After all, if the change just switched her ancestors from Irish to Asian, then t would look insignificant compared to all the other wild mutations. All of the Changed were going to be wildly chromatic, so the skin of the human character would be a lot less fun to describe.

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one person's neat plot point can be another person's religion :)

I can definitely respect the Hindu religion, and it is usually welcomed to be used in media, as long as it is not used in an intentionally damning or hurtful manner. I've consulted a few groups on this before, and while the 'undead stage' would probably be a sticking point, most Samsaric faiths embrace media that encourage consideration of their beliefs. Even the zealots in those religions would get more offended by my consumption of beef than by the use of reincarnation in place of heaven or hell. Incidentally, I'm expecting the usual backlash from the Christians, but hey, this is porn.

it feels a bit weird for something that is usually "eternal" to have an expiration date. but I admit, I love vampires and stuff :P

I'm leaning away from the eternal aspect, partially because it leads to creepy situations like 500 year old vampires (Twilight) and 10,000 year old demiliches (Final Fantasy X and X-2) grooming the living children to marry them later.

make sure that you don't express anything like "and humans are the purest and more gentle of beings" or anything :) a lot of the ins and outs of reincarnation could probably be generally unknown to everyone... and probably a secret. Or maybe... one of those things that, well, some people believe, some don't, some aren't sure.

The theme, if any, is that humans carry their imperfections regardless of form. I'm not going to leave any character totally pure. The exact mechanisms of reincarnation are supposed to be known to me, but are supposed to be either superstitions or old ghost stories, with the best theories coming from people who have dedicated their lives to accessing past lives. The undead thing definitely happens, discussed further below.

I also dunno about straight up 'expiration date' thing.

The concept of an expiration date is found in a lot of deterministic faiths, but I'm probably going to abandon it in favor of a more sudden shift.

While the disagreements about what is good, and what will lead to a better place in your next life, feel natural, they also feel less focal to the protagonist, so I think I can leave them by the wayside for now.

like puberty or menopause.. .then I figure i'd might be pretty traumatizing if your body changes forms or function. I mean... zombie penis monster?how would THAT work?

You bring up an interesting alternative if all of these people are changing after having been human for over a decade of their formative years, and puberty is what makes the Change happen.

and... yeah. I mean.. I'm imagining grandma getting cancer and everyone waiting grimly with shotguns, swords and claws for the day It Happens. Hopefully she lives that long. If she does, hopefully she survives the aftermath. but everyone's done their best to keep her strong... even knowing that it'll just make the fight harder when it happens. But they're better folk than the people on the other side of the holler. They just tossed Ol' Jess out when the swelling started. They still see him sometimes, roaming through the hills. They keep hoping someone will happen by and put him out of his misery, but, well... It's probably going to have to be them. They just hope it won't be when Grandma's cancer blooms...

You should write greeting cards. And horror movies.