Kaelri

Participants of the White Rose project know that I’ve started work on the commentary document. Since it’s basically nothing but a big pile of spoilers, I’d rather not make this publicly available yet. In the meantime, however, I thought some of you might be interested in the visual media which inspired White Rose’s primary setting: the city of Macha.

Like all the cities of Cernun, Macha filled out its original borders, then expanded, not laterally, but vertically. The result is that much of the city, especially the core, is a truly three-dimensional space. Buildings, streets, blocks, even whole complexes are suspended at their original elevations, as excavation and construction take place directly beneath them. It is therefore difficult to draw a line where a particular property ends and the outside begins. Indeed, in many ways, the city is a single indivisible labyrinth.

Eye candy after the jump.

This concept obviously owes a lot to D’ni, the fictional underground city at the center of the Myst franchise. I suppose the heart of its appeal to me is that it blurs the definitions of ideas like “house,” “street,” “wall,” “floor.” Like D’ni, Macha is not a well-planned, well-delineated artificial environment. It is organic, diverse, and confusing as hell. It is not natural, of course – everything was at one time built by human hands. But the architecture is so old, deep and obscured by its own aimless sprawl that no living person has any hope of making sense of it. You may not have any idea where that unlit doorway or dusty staircase will take you. Maybe no one does. Unfortunately, I never quite figured out how to render such an environment in a written medium, but  I think I occasionally managed to convey the surreal quality of living in that world. For instance, both the ground floor and the basement warehouse of White Rose headquarters had exits on what appears to be street level. There is a sound logic to it, but newcomers like Soraya and Sasha were clearly thrown a little off balance.

The vertical layering, on the other hand, is easier to visualize because you can see it in the real world. This comes directly from my time wandering the streets – and the space below them – of downtown Toronto. For those who don’t know, Toronto has an expansive underground pedestrian network, called PATH. The way that it seamlessly permeates the boundaries of countless high rises, department stores and subway lines made a real impression on me: it showed me that this could work, and work well. In fact, Toronto’s Eaton Center is a wonderful microcosm of what Macha’s Perihelion District looks like. The mall itself has four or five floors, with walkways, stairways, elevators intersecting each other in a delightfully confusing pattern, even within the stores. Each of the floors leads straight off onto one of Toronto’s planes: the subway; PATH; Yonge Street; the split-level sanctuary of Trinity Square, nestled between three towers; and eventually, foot bridges to the hotel and parking garage on either side. Now expand the structural lattice of Eaton Center to the size of a city district, and you get Perihelion. (Expand it even more, and you get the quintessential 3D city: Coruscant, of Star Wars.) Google says this word doesn’t exist, so I’m gonna coin it right now: stadtpunk.

I once described Macha’s atmosphere as a mixture of Victorian London, 1930s Berlin, and the Battle of Stalingrad. Berlin is the baseline: not only is Machan culture distinctly Germanesque, but the technology level – pre-digital, pre-nuclear, with rationed access to telephone and radio services – is analogous to WW2 Europe. At the time I designed the setting, I really felt like dieselpunk was a neglected style, at least in contrast to its older, more famous sibling, steampunk. Now, don’t get me wrong – I loves me some aviator goggles as much as mainstream society will tolerate, but for WR, I knew I wanted something a little grittier, a little less romantic, to keep the focus on the ideas, the emotions, the visceral experience of scorched-earth political resistance. Thus, Macha is rife with these aristocratic strains, with its hereditary establishment and a caste system based on loyalty and blood – with a sharp physical division between the servile masses and the privileged aristocracy, who legitimately held themselves for gods – and as the story begins, we are witnessing the breaking point, where the brutal conditions of oppression, decadence and poverty have worn that barrier away, leaving the Matronae and their elitist trappings conspicuously exposed.

And at any given moment, the city encompasses this entire spectrum: while Everfalls is reeling from the second Purge, utterly ungoverned and engulfed in the fog of war, Court officials like Gwydion Fehlstein were hosting holiday banquets.

I have a bunch more of these, so I think I might make a series out of this. Hope it’s captured someone’s interest.