“Undercity of Ot” is the sequel to the Death of the Corpsewizard. The idea came to me in a dream.
Ot is oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Built on the northern face of a mountain which, in these latter days, has, by fashion, no name, the city itself is the epicenter of rough cut, stone alignments haphazardly sunk into the marshy valley below the mountain. At times, Ot has also been then epicenter of trade, art, mathematics, but now the city is ruled by competing groups of political parties, all hopelessly mired in the swamp of history. Secret police and paramilitary groups and scruffy gangs have partitioned the old city into haphazard districts, without much consideration for the historical and architectural structures of the city itself.
And beneath the streets, the undercity - huge stormwater and sewer systems maintained by generations of magical and mechanical artifices, and beneath and interpenetrating those, older cities, and chambers of arcane machinery, much of which still functioning, if their operation can be called that, since their utility is forgotten or no longer meaningful. And somewhere in these chambers, the rumors say, the remains of the Corpse Wizard.
You play someone who comes to the city to find them so that you can use their supposedly undiminished magical potencies for revenge.
The game will be a roguelike where you move between districts of the city by using the undercity, which extends both beneath and between the districts. I kinda think I want the overcity to be hand designed and the undercity to be procedural, but perhaps only slowly changing over time. Maybe the penalty for dying in the undercity is that it reorganizes itself to a greater or lesser extent.
I’m a little concerned this whole “old city thing” is played out and uncreative at this point, but what can I do?
I wonder how different the romance of living with ancient history is to non-New World-ers. But then, there’s always somewhere with older, more impressively visible ruins; if you live in Rome, do you sigh over the Acropolis?
actually I’m also from a colony. Malaysia. The British Britished that shit up pretty good.
But I know what you’re saying. Best not to get caught up in the mystique of it. At the same time that this place has got an ancient sovereign who is still revered is pretty interesting to me.
They know their country has a deal. And that deal is big. They don’t take it for granted.
It’s also the case that ‘kill the past and the olds in power’ will be an eternal story type, and the most straightforward representation is through crumbling, forgotten ruins.
Do you mean, because of the cultural assimilation programs, there were post-colonial waves of reclamation, of longing for a distinct cultural past that seems to have disappeared? That that feeling is probably similar to the American romance of a lost bedrock?
The assimilation programs are ongoing. ‘Sodomy’ is still illegal. You put your ‘race’ on your identity card. etc. I think that continentalism offers more than post colonialism (which never took off in Malaysia), for the Americas as well. Finally, Malaysia has no visible ancient past to speak of. Immigration and displacement (immigants, I knew it was dem) makes up most of our national narrative. Offshoots of India and China have taken root there, but much more recently than in ‘Indo China’.
Imported morals seem much stickier than more obvious cultural markers; shape a people’s sense of right and wrong, and it takes a lot of energy to change. And with the reinforcement from imported pop culture and elite education overseas, postcolonial movements are certainly partial at best.
I’m interested in this in light of some of my work / engagment with the art community here. How do we make ‘Khmer art’ or ‘Khmer movies’ without falling prey to exoticism or nationalism. This is a country where the idea of ‘national spirit’ very much at work. As an Asian it is very seductive and I am trying to find ways to criticise it without ‘resisting’ it as such, as it makes up the fabric of my life here.
I’m not entirely sure how you’re using these; do you mean, movements like pan-Africanism, Bolivarism? In Malaysia’s case, a sort of pan-South Pacific-ism?
all of these I will research and reply in a week or so when I actually know what I’m talking about. The answer will probably turn out to be all of the above
I am working with some hip hop artists here. That’s a modern art form. It flowed into Cambodia maybe through the Long Beach migration. It is getting bigger here. I am wondering about the progressive waves of re and de politicisation of black art forms in rap’s home country.
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