Oct 9, 2017

World a Day, #9

Got another world! One thing I'm coming to realize is just how long these take to come up with and write down, at least in this degree of detail. I'm hoping to do playtesting of the rules set soon, so I'll need to closely watch whether world-building takes too long. In the meantime, have this world of school rivalries run amok!

Check out the rules set here, and as always, the generator is here.
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The wars of tomorrow will be fought with magic and super-tech. The wars of tomorrow will be over the top, fought with explosions and heavy weapons, and disregard all concept of collateral damage. The wars of tomorrow will be fought by soldiers trained in strict discipline, and indoctrinated into bitter, pointless enmity.

The wars of tomorrow will be school rivalries. Welcome to New Canyon High.


Series name: The War for New Canyon High

Our heroes go to New Canyon High School, a deliberately quaint school. The two-story building is sandwiched between six titanic, hundred-story apartment buildings, with an antigrav platform hovering above the school with a high-powered LED light to simulate sunlight. (There will be an episode where New Canyon’s rivals turn this into an orbital death laser.)

New Canyon is locked in an eternal rivalry with their semi-neighbors, The Socratic Institute for Advanced Pupils (the acronym is pronounced “psi-app”). SIAP is located on top of one of the neighboring apartment buildings, and attracts only the smartest, the most ruthless, and definitely the richest students from across the solar system. Like New Canyon, SIAP is a boarding school, but SIAP’s school uniforms are hyper-fashionable variants of jumpsuits and flight jackets, with unofficial tolerance for clothes that still look as rich and incorporate the core colors and designs. The rivalry between the two schools dates back decades.


[Scene]
Zax: “So… what exactly started this rivalry?”
Katlyn: “Betrayal from on high…”

Flashback: A bored-looking SIAP student is at the edge of the roof, tapping through her phone. Bored, she flips a quarter, catches it, flips it, catches it, then tosses it over the railing. The camera pans over a bit, follows the coin as it reaches the apex of its arc, spinning slightly, then the camera drops fast down the 200 stories. We see a brand-new school with the sign “Canyon High School,” with a number of students and teachers standing as an idealistic-looking principal gives a speech at a podium. A streak of silver falls, and there’s a beat-pause as she stands still, then falls over, the entire crowd erupting with concern.

Zax: “That’s… wow, that’s insane.”
Zax: “Wait, the sign said ‘Canyon High School.’ How did it become ‘New Canyon’?”

Flashback: The same bored-looking SIAP student is tapping through her phone again, in a mirror of the earlier shot. She tosses something small over the edge again, looking bored; we track the object to the apex of the toss, then a picture-in-a-picture shows the student tapping a skull-and-crossbones button on her phone’s screen, and the small capsule she threw abruptly explodes out into a giant anvil. The camera drops down to Canyon High, where a number of students and teachers are hanging a wreath on a casket. All are in tears. We get about three seconds of this shot before KABAM.


Jaydah is a recent junior-year transfer to New Canyon, originally being a student at SIAP. She was a robotics wiz, leading the robotics club to awards and prestige, the only currency of note at SIAP. In her shadow was Raeyan, a SIAP student with a decent knack for robotics, but driven to dominate any group she’s a part of. Raeyan had seniority in the club, so Jaydah put up with her ordering the club around and taking all the credit. Collaborating with her on robotics was productive, too, Raeyan had a determination that often made workable some stroke of genius that Jaydah’d had. Before a major tournament, though, they’d all worked themselves ragged, and when Raeyan gave her an order, Jaydah snapped back.

Raeyan grabbed her, dragged her out of the room, and threw her off the roof. This marked the end of their collaboration.

In the stress of the fall, Jaydah’s genetic affinity for air magic showed itself, and she floated safely down to ground, landing softly in New Canyon’s main courtyard. Reviews of her landing were mixed, with some New Canyon students appreciating the aesthetics and the gentle landing, and others charging energy blasts because a SIAP student had just come to New Canyon. She convinced most of them to let her transfer and join the fight against SIAP, but the class president refused to believe her, and attacked. One of his sword strikes missed Jaydah, but cut into one of the bystanders, the freshman Tray Larkell. The crowd erupted, horrified that their class president had let his hatred get one of his students hurt. As Jaydah rushed over to try to patch him up, the class president lined up a final attack on her, but was cut down from behind by the vice president, senior Katlyn Hunter. The crowd hushed, and one of the seniors picked up the president’s fallen sword, presenting it to her and administering the rites of succession.

Meanwhile, Raeyan covered up the evidence in her attempted murder. She claimed that Jaydah had fallen out by accident, and anyways, any SIAP student who couldn’t avoid randomly falling off a tall building would be a liability in the corporate world. The teacher who would’ve been Jaydah’s best defense, physics teacher Nisa Sonnet, was brainwashed by Raeyan, and she refused to testify to Jaydah’s character, ensuring she would be expelled.

Since then, Raeyan has become one of the leaders of the SIAP war effort, wielding an electrified katana as elegantly as she poaches teachers from New Canyon. Ilanah Larkell, the drama teacher of New Canyon, recently started working at SIAP, leaving behind her wife and son, who have joined Jaydah’s new team. Raeyan’s proxies on the SIAP PTA are slowly bending policy, diverting more resources towards the war with New Canyon. Raeyan was defeated once when Jaydah refused to die, and this reminder of her failure must be destroyed.

Tray and Abigail Larkell work with Jaydah as part of her strike team, rapidly mobilizing against SIAP attacks and raiding it whenever possible. Tray is Jaydah’s classmate, and Abigail is one of New Canyon’s PE teacher. (Abigail has arranged for any raids against SIAP to be treated as extra-credit assignments.)

Trey has recovered from his injuries, and is determined to do his part to rescue his mother, Ilhana. He’s worked closely with Jaydah on an expandable battlesuit, carried around in a wallet-sized condensed form. He’s still traumatized, though, and reluctant to use the full power of the suit. Nonetheless, its size and double railguns is enough to intimidate many enemies.

Abigail has always been a proponent of heavy discipline, but in joining Jaydah’s team, she’s had to accept that Jaydahis the team leader. She keeps herself on a rigid schedule of training, teaching, field trips, protein shakes, and more training. She’s become so fast that she occasionally seems to teleport; when she was a student at New Canyon, she got the nickname of Aby, for Already Behind You. She’s always watchful of her son Trey in battle, making sure he’s not overwhelmed in close combat since being traumatized by a melee weapon.

Zax is another new transfer who signed up for Jaydah’s team, but unbeknownst to them, he’s actually a mole from SIAP. He’s a brawler, able to shape-shift into a golden dragon. He’s agreed to this because he wants to combine SIAP’s tech with New Canyon’s emphasis on magical and personal training. If he can walk out of this as an ultra-buff mecha-dragon, he’ll be a happy man. That said, he’s fairly unassuming in conversation, enjoyable to talk with and open to listening. As such, he can often convince people of things when talking with them one-on-one, but persuading a crowd or during a hectic situation isn’t his strong suit.

Marten is an old New Canyon student, a senior this year. He joined Jaydah’s team on a lark, and some members aren’t sure if he’ll be dedicated when the chips are down. That said, his ability to project energy blasts from his hands makes him valuable, and he’s shown a hatred for Raeyana specifically – no one’s sure why, he just jokes and deflects when asked about it.


The last member of the team is Katlyn, the secondary protagonist of the series, former class vice-president, and now president by right of succession. She’s a swordsman, trained by Abigail to peak physical performance, with an inherent affinity with metals – when she needs extra strength, for a strike or a jump, she can pull on the force of the materials around her. When she was a sophomore, she climbed the side of SIAP’s building, bypassing the building security and keycard elevators that had foiled them in the past. She returned from the raid with a new scar, plus the bloody neo-katana of the SIAP class president. She was inducted into student government for this, granted her own small class as her demesne; from there, she’s worked herself up through the ranks, inspiring and defending her classmates, never showing any sign of self-interest, and never letting herself relax or fail.

She technically outranks Jaydah, but Jaydah knows the SIAP tech and security better, and Katlyn’s agreed to co-leadership of the team. Katlyn still hasn’t quite acclimated to being class president, and she regrets the necessity of cutting down the previous president. She’s fixated on Raeyan as the cause of that situation, since she was the reason Jaydah landed at New Canyon.

Although Katlyn is one of the students most invested in the war, she’s also the one who shows the most awareness of a world outside of it. She’s been working with Abigail since she was a freshman, so she’s seen that Abigail stayed right with New Canyon after graduating, instead of moving on. Katlyn is determined to win the war so that she can move on to doing bigger, more important things after graduating, instead of worrying about the safety of later New Canyon students. She puts up with the least grandstanding from SIAP students, contemptuously ignoring any grandiose speeches they make before attacking.

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