Setting – Archived

Geography

The country is Marsellia, like France, the adjective is Marselline, like French. The capital is San Rosille. The bad part of town where the magic-users live is Strawberryfield. The address where our main characters reside is 217 Violena Street, between Green Dragon Alley and Swan’s Neck. (Please do not take Milo home, he is allowed out.) The ambience is Frenchified, too, but with vastly different history. The language is Anglais, a hybrid of French and English, with a more French-like dialect in the South. There is a river, the Arles, two harbours, and one airport for the airships.

The world map is seriously messed up and oversimplified, but there are many vaguely-familiar countries with vaguely-familiar people living in them. Anatolia is the continent Marsellia calls home. It bears a resemblance to Europe, but is located in the East. The long war is over, but another is already brewing.

Marsellia calls itself an empire, but their only territories are one and a half islands in the Southern Calixtus Ocean.

Recent History

Marsellia is recovering after getting their collective ass kicked in what they are now calling the Prokovian Conflict. It was the Great Undertaking right up until they lost, and then it didn’t seem so great any more. They now find themselves a Prokovian subsidiary with a high degree of autonomy — which can be removed at any time if they get too uppity. Their emperor is calling himself the Prime Minister now. (And if he ever finds his testicles again, the General will still be happy to serve him, even though she is technically retired.)

San Rosille itself was subject to a years-long siege. They ate the zoo. They have one hippo remaining and a small dog — it’s a Shih-Tzu. (These are the jokes, folks!) The nicer bits of it have been fairly well-repaired, with electric streetlights and new tech. Places like Strawberryfield are having to make do with a little less infrastructure and a little more ingenuity.

A lot of people, and a lot of places, are still coping with war damage. Lines to collect pension cheques are long and unruly. Riots are frequent, but unproductive.

“Modern” Life

Magic is real and merges seamlessly with technology and human beings. There are people walking around with inorganic material (and organic material that was not originally theirs) replacing their missing pieces. There are also people walking around who are the same colour as Skittles and M&M’s — these are innate magic-users and they are regarded with suspicion. (For more on Magic, see Mechanics.)

Fashion is approximately analogous to Edwardian times, give or take the corset, hem and sleeve styles. In Strawberryfield, where most of the action takes place, it is all rather outdated, all-purpose and drab. SoHo tends towards quirky and colourful, with unnatural shades of hair in asymmetrical cuts and clothing with intentionally-tattered edges. The rich people uptown have the freedom to be elegant and conservative or absolute fops. (Please, for the love of god, do not expect me to keep the fashion consistent in the illustrations!)

Housing options range from country estates with attached farmland and sharecroppers, to shared beds with strangers in doss houses, to shelters and workhouses and asylums for the chronically inconvenient. The middle classes tend to have rental apartments over storefront businesses, which they may or may not run.

Technology

Magic has given the tech a boost in some places and held it back in others. We have toasters and hotplates but no airplanes, rigid airships being quite enough with a little augmentation. Radios are common, but telephones are rare. Hyacinth’s house is a bit of an anomaly. She has no pipes or wiring because they ripped out all the metal during the siege, and she won’t have appliances that take sacrifices. (It is possible to have a hotplate that eats mice. More useful than a pet snake!)

Television isn’t here yet, but serials, news, and music may be consumed via the radio, periodicals with magically-animated pictures and sound, or at movie theatres. Postcards with magically-animated pictures bear a suspicious resemblance to GIFs and memes.

There are gaslamps around Hyacinth’s house, and some places with no lamps at all. Other neighbourhoods have seen far better repairs and updates after the war. Most roads are cobbled, a few are paved. Sidewalks are rare. There is bus service, though it is a little more sparse in crummy neighbourhoods. Buses, cars, horses and pedestrians have to share the streets, with horses being a bit more prominent since the war.

Of course, you could get around town with a giant mechanical spider made of repurposed garbage that’s been hacked so it runs on sugar, but who would do something crazy like that? (Milo looks to the left, looks to the right, and decides against raising his hand.)

Though magic makes all aspects of modern life easier, there is a stigma attached to DIY projects (such as a giant mechanical spider). Proper magic should be done by trained professionals, automated, and sold retail in friendly packaging.

Music

They seem to be getting some familiar music in this universe, but not exactly. Copyright laws necessitated some gymnastics (and I may still get in trouble some day), but be aware that the Beatles they dance to in Marsellia are packaged way differently and don’t sound the same. I kept all the band names — even when they don’t necessarily make sense — because the real artists deserve credit for the works I’m referencing. (And, in my opinion, the corporate interests that own those works do not.)

Electric guitar is on its way, but it has not yet occurred to anyone to plug an instrument directly into an amplifier. Magic allows people to adjust sound waves themselves, live. That’s where the Voice From Music process comes from, and why all silent films were sung-through musicals. Mordecai’s old job allowed him to play the dialogue. Bowed instruments have much more of a presence in pop music because it’s easier to modify the vibrations they make.

Magic allows for data storage in a quasi-digital format. All types of recording technology, including drawings and photographs, have been using it to improve quality and add features for quite some time. Currently, music is most often delivered by radio, record and music reel (at the movie theatre). Wax cylinders are outdated and no longer produced. All of these have much better resolution and/or storage than the versions we are familiar with.

It’s pretty obvious this universe is not getting their music in the same order as ours. Magic is both a randomizer and a convenient excuse. Different artists are assigned to different eras and I’ll try to spread the wealth of the 60s, 70s and 80s over several decades, sometimes shuffled together like a pack of cards. More recent music is already out there and more of it will appear in the future, but we know the classics are classics because there has been a lot of time to weed out the Top 40 crap, so I will try to stick to the good stuff.

Except for Milo. Milo has no judgment, he likes anything happy. I have a little bit of judgment, but I still like a lot of really dumb songs, which I’ll usually give to him so he can love them unselfconsciously.

Eventually, if only for my own reference, I will have to produce a timeline matching up artists and their albums to years on the calendar. I am certain I will screw it up. In the meantime, know that Elton John and disco (known as synco, due to a lack of discs) were contemporary for David and Barnaby, the Beatles and British (Elban) Invasion for Mordecai, and the Buggles and new wave for Erik. It almost makes sense! (No, it doesn’t and it never will.)

Magic vs. History vs. Society

A warning: In all cases, even when things look familiar to us, in Tin Soldier they exist in a totally different context. This reality is hackable and people have been making changes for a long time. The toaster may look perfectly ordinary, but the insides have been altered to power it with sugar, or with a jar of glow-in-the-dark paint. That person may look South Asian, but ask them what the vegetarian tigers have done to their agricultural output back home.

In realistic terms, I’m one person and I can’t juggle an entire divergent planet without dropping a few things. The blanket excuse is not that people in Soldier On are better or worse than us, but that they had access to magic and we didn’t. Some differences will be motivated by cultural commentary, but most of them can just be chalked up to the fact that their universe works differently — period. Someone decided one random domino needed to be knocked over, magic gave them the ability to do so, and the next thing you know there’s a Potato War in fake England.

Bear with me and try to remember that you’re not at a clothing store looking into a regular mirror when you see aspects of your culture and history mangled beyond all recognition. I am probably not trying to insult you by implying those pants make your butt look three feet wide. I’m running a funhouse. Sometimes a nightmare funhouse, but in most cases, things just look weird because it’s neat when things look weird. You should be here to see weird things, not to buy pants. If you need an honest assessment of your butt, there are historians and sociologists in the real world who can devote a lot more time and energy to it.