The Samsara Project - A Sunwards Ordeal

The road ahead is difficult, and that is what makes it worth walking.

Preamble

There is a certain richness of experience that comes with being able to recognize patterns in lived experience which align with the many words we have to describe those very things. Irony, deja vu, sarcasm, premonition, paradoxes even - they are small ridges on the saran wrap of interaction that bend the light on it in interesting ways. Of course I can only speak for my self, but I sorely enjoy when real life aligns in a way that I can attach a name to.

You are reading this because the Samsara project is at one hundred thousand words. Around this time last year, SBL1 was also calculated to reach a hundred thousand words. That prompted Scenario 3, Scenario 7, and the rest was history. We stand yet again at another titanic door that levies its weight against us. Merely a year ago, we had to walk away from this door because we were found wanting. But times are different now.

In Past is Prologue, I sought to ascertain where we were going from where we had gone already and where we were, and so now we can look back on what we’ve done since October 3rd and ask ourselves ‘Where are we now?‘. Let us begin.

The Samsara Project

Boasting of one hundred thousand words spread across fifteen folders and fifty-six files, the Samsara Project has grown to considerable numerical magnitude. I am unsure what the word count was around the publishing of ‘Past is Prologue’, but since then I’ve written what I estimate to be about forty thousand words. There have been many drafts, final cuts and rewrites - rewrites especially - with some docs being trapped in what I’ve chosen to call ‘iterative hell’. Not without cause however, as after spending fifteen thousand words to make a five thousand word doc, those last five thousand words are dense with detail and rife with logic and potential. More simply put, its been a grind.

So where are we currently?

Those who’ve been party to my discussions will recall that I broke down the development of the Samsara Project into three main stages; pWB, the pure or ‘mechanical’ worldbuilding, NarratWB, the narrative worldbuilding and the pNarrat, the pure narrative. Each of these sections share a fair bit of overlap, but all encompass a collection of docs beneath them that serve to grant bones and flesh to the Samsara universe. With each doc we explore some new thing, from powers and planets to the cultures of people dwelling within them.

We’re at a stage now where the pWB is perhaps 80% complete, with NarratWB following at maybe 60%. pNarrat is impossible to define at the moment, or to really speak on, and so we can discuss a bit about the other two.

The pWB was where we started with Samsara and it began with laying a lot of very poor groundwork that needed considerable amounts of rectification down the line. For many months I played the ‘ideas man’, and most of the work was throwing said ideas at walls and seeing what stuck. There was a lot of studying, a lot of headbanging, a lot of going back and forth - first with a hammer to see what stood criticism, then with a comb to find the deep flaws that escaped scrutiny. It was hard but fun work. It was defined by many ‘eureka!’ moments; flashes of immaculate clarity in which I could reconcile a pile of scrap into a functioning engine, and turn ideas into established mechanics on how the world worked.

A very good example of this was Void. The Void is a multifaceted concept in Samsara that details a place, the powers from it, the doctrines it spawned and the people who hold them. At its most elementary, the Void required me to understand how four dimensions work, in a sense that the Void occupied a conceptual ‘down’ or below, rather than a separate space independent of others, accessible by some form of gateway. The Void also had a number of properties it exhibited, such as slowing the movement of those passing through space. Put simply, the Void was very complex, with many moving parts, and reconciling all of them required some core principle about which all could harmoniously rotate.

I take no credit for what did it. All of that rests firmly at the feet of someone who I will speak on at length later in this document.

The making of Samsara required - demanded - perhaps, the employment of a litany of skills. Doctrines, I’ve chose to call them, to better align myself with the thinking my characters will perform in Samsara as well. Not all of them have I given quirky names such as the Axle Design Method or the Tour Guide vs. Brochure Document Design Method or the Consolidation Protocol, but if I were to make any point from this, just as tasking as the making of Samsara was learning how to make Samsara. Often on the spot I would rise from my seat, stare intensely at the wall and compel myself to think of problems in new ways - like rotating a Rubik’s cube to find what section to rotate. Often work on Samsara wouldn’t be writing down any new material, but rather rearranging old docs so that newness may emerge from them.

These new manners of thinking are necessitated by something I have spoken on but not in much detail; the Shape of the Strider. Originally when I planned to begin writing Samsara at a stage about a quarter of where we are now, I wrote a doc I called the ‘Launch Parameters’ which contained everything I felt would be sufficient to tell a story. Needless to say, it failed. Any one thing hinged upon three other things, which in turn hinged on three more things.

Take the Vaults for example; interplanetary super-constructs defined by emergent calcic intelligences that guard caches of powerful woven chalk. I had to define these Vaults, and the intelligences, and what they guarded, and how Striders created the practice of ‘Kache Krashing’ to describe breaching these Vaults, and how an essential part of the breaching was the eponymous ‘Breach Protocol’ that is executed by Slates wielded by Strider Glassbreakers. Slates that are only able to combat the Vaults because of the existence of the glass-root network called the Dendro-Vitric that is housed in the conceptual ‘up’ of the Switchboard known as the Vitric Shelf. I have paraphrased the contents of four different docs. Samsara is large. But this largeness is all striving towards defining the Shape of the Strider.

The Strider is the building block of the Samsara canon. The Strider flies through the physical and metaphorical. It plays fast and loose with the sciences. It fights by pulling on reality itself and bending it according to new parameters. The Switchboard is both a minefield and a playground to it. The making of Samsara is ultimately a quest to answer a very many number of questions, and each of those questions is another brush-stroke on a canvas. The final result is the Strider. All roads point to the Strider.

And as we work on the NarratWB, we come ever closer to finally defining that shape. And this is a good thing, because I can now talk - briefly - about the next stage.

I titled this document ‘A Sunwards Ordeal’ because the task seems both massive and blinding. A man rises from his slumber and declares he will dine with the sun. We rightfully call him a madman or ignore him, until months down the line he has a suit and a rocket and resolve that burns even brighter than what he hopes to accomplish. Samsara is not hard for me in the way Chess or learning a language is hard. The only strategies and tactics to learn and memorize are the ones I invent. The difficulty of Samsara arises from what I hope to achieve, and how I have tasked myself to outdo even the work I did yesterday. Everything can be done better until it categorically cannot be, in which case it becomes better by ensuring all that surrounds it is the best it can be as well.

But we are coming close to satisfying those exacting conditions. We are seeing documents come out of iteration hell, and hold states that I can - finally - describe as complete, polished, nigh perfect.

And with that I declare the next stage of Samsara; the road to Act One.

Act One is the first major narrative endeavor of the Samsara Project. It is the culmination of upwards of a year of work, minimum. Really, it’s better seen as the culmination of all the writing I have done, ever, attaching a development time of close to ten years to it. There is a doc that gives it a skeleton, and every day we attach a little bit of muscle, ligament and tendon. But it exists, and it is what I am striving towards now.

Before I close, I must give credit where credit is due. It is not often that things happen that make you suspect predetermination, especially if you subscribe to manners of thinking that actively refute it. But the making of Samsara would not be possible without an individual who - if I were just a smidge more self-centered - I would declare was placed in my path for this very purpose. They are far more than that. Far more than a wall to fling ideas at have they been a shoulder to lean upon and a source of both strength and comfort. In their own ways have they forged both the Samsara Project and I, its creator, into better iterations of themselves - and continue to do so - asking nothing in return.

You have my utmost gratitude, doctor. You are among the few and the great.

I will close. The March Expansion will now be online, containing the first docs under the NarratWB. It has been a long time coming, but I reckon that you will like what you see, and there will be much to discuss once you do.

Our greatest accomplishments lie ahead of us.

Onwards, sunwards!

• Cryogen, Shattered Scribe