It all started after playing far too much
Wizardry on the old Apple //e in the early-to-mid-1980s. I had discovered Tolkien years earlier, and I wanted to give the elves, orcs and dwarves in my own role-playing game their own languages. Soon after, I first read Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four, and decided to give the project a futuristic dystopian setting.
That is, if I had bothered to ever do anything with it. I put it all aside for a couple decades, until I started writing
Symphonie apocalyptique a few years ago. Everything connected to the story of the epic symphony, itself intended to be a soundtrack to such a game or even film if such a thing should ever come to be, came back to life, and when I’m having occasional writer’s block as a composer, I work on the other things.
The game is tentatively titled DIES IRÆ (styled in all capital letters with the ligatured A and E), which is, of course, Latin for “Day of Wrath” and the name of the sequence hymn of the old Requiem Mass. It is set in a not-so-distant Earth, but involves races of “elves” (actually having traits of both elves and djinn) and “orcs”. The former are remnants of a civilization in the Levant that collapsed around 9600 BC due to corruption of magic; they had been hiding in the Caucasus for the millennia since. The latter are mutated humans, the unfortunate victims of a less-than-ethical scientific experiment.
The main points of the plot of the game:
- During a time of widespread troubles, a Texas-based religious cult with a political party/movement as a front organization seeks to rebuild a Final Reich, a worldwide Novus Imperium Romanum.
- The remains of an ancient civilization, long lost to the world until its recent discovery, claims to know of a power the group could use to take over the world.
- A select group of individuals have been chosen on a mission to save the world from tyranny and destruction.
In the time of this game, the world was at peace, united under a global federal government. Previously, a fascist resurgence had failed to plunge the planet into world war, but a series of economic and environmental disasters threaten chaos. Crime, terrorism and unexplained incidents further instill fear among the populace, and some have begun to lose faith in liberal democracy and clamor for the perceived safety of authoritarianism. One of these new movements seeks to build a “New Roman Empire” in the West, and then in the world.
The “orcs” (or “ogres”, “trolls”, “ghouls” and other derogatory names) were created by a project where volunteers (many of them military and prison inmates, and some probably not even “volunteers”) subjected themselves to genetic experimentation as part of a project to create a breed of superhumans. They were given great physical strength as well as fearless and fierce personalities, but were also brainwashed to be obedient to their masters, either as siuper soldiers or, ultimately for the vast majority, slaves. Eventually, the orcs revolted and escaped, struggling to survive with humanity hostile to them. A series of conflicts between orc gangs and (normal) humans, known as the “Orc Wars”, then resulted, with the humans eventually prevailing. Many orcs were slaughtered; the survivors were relocated to prisons, especially the infamous camp built in Antarctica, originally built jointly by the USA and Russia as a “ultramax” facility for the world’s worst criminals.
The “elves” (also known as “djinn” and other names), who call themselves the T’aq (a native name meaning "hidden, secret") have a far more mysterious origin. All that is known about them is they claim to be the remnant of a lost civilization long predating human history. Some time during the thawing of the last Ice Age when humanity in the Fertile Crescent had begun to transform from hunter-gatherer nomads to agricultural settlers, a tribe rose to prominence among the others. They built a walled city, said to be in modern-day Lebanon, and developed a technology rivaling that of the early Industrial Age. However, around 9600 BC, their leader, a wizard who had become very powerful from evil magic, proclaimed himself king and absolute ruler, then betrayed his people to hostile neighbors. Most of them were slaughtered; the survivors withdrew to mountains, forests and deserts. The largest number today, an unknown thousands, inhabit scattered hidden villages in the mountains of modern-day Georgia, Azerbaijan and the Russian North Caucasus. They too had mutated, gaining their elf-like appearance by the corruption of magic, becoming exceptionally intelligent and agile as well as long-lived, but at a cost of physical strength.
There are also at least two constructed languages (conlangs) in the game, neither of which have been developed very much beyond fundamental theoretical stages.
T’qi (written طقي in extended Arabic script) is the languages spoken by the elves; it has an extremely complex inflected grammar and a huge inventory of consonants and vowels. Though meant to be an isolate, that is, of no known relation to any other language, it is inspired by classical Arabic, Sanskrit and Tibetan as well as other Caucasian languages, particularly Georgian and the now-extinct Ubykh, as well as Navajo and other Native American languages. Another influence is itself a conlang: the philosophical language
Ithkuil.
The T’aq also use a sexagesimal (base 60) number system as the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians did, as well as a musical scale that divides the octave into
72 equal steps (a tuning I also use for my own music).
The other language is a global lingua franca, pidgin or creole—an Esperanto-type international language called Duniya Lengua “world language”. It has been used mostly for trade and informal communication, not meant to replace natural human languages, but the orcs have adopted it as their own language. It is based primarily on six of the most spoken languages in the world as of the early 21st century: Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi-Urdu, Russian and Arabic. Other major languages such as Portuguese, French, Bengali, Japanese and Malay-Indonesian are also used for vocabulary data. Its grammar, like Chinese, is mostly isolating with few bound morphemes, basically grammatical suffixes that make nouns plural and verbs past or perfect tense and some other things.
Another product of biological experimentation are the “lycanthropes” or “weres” (i.e. werewolves, werebears, weretigers etc.), are captured wild animals with artificial intelligence implants, which too have escaped and are reportedly attacking humans. Also, certain people seeking empire are allegedly practicing the same dark arts that destroyed the T’aq long ago, even those that supposedly can turn the dead into undead.
Though intended to be a first person shooter/RPG hybrid, much like the
Deus Ex series, it is to reward stealth and non-violent solutions more than hacking and slashing and blowing stuff up. Also, though magic exists in the game, it is inherently evil and should be used sparingly if at all. A lot of philosophy will be involved, something recognizable to fans of the
Final Fantasy series (and for that matter, both
Star Trek and
Star Wars).
More on this later. I really want to make this thing original, as well as the soundtrack. Right now, I'm playing far too much
Skyrim.
