There are a number of ways to begin a novel, and more specifically a Multiverser novel.
MJ in his delightful novel chose to begin with the characters already in the Verse for several worlds. This gave them some basic knowledge of what was going on, and started them on the path to herodom.
I tried another technique in Worldwalker. You start by establishing the characters and their problems. This creates the Norm. Then you have the Break from the Norm which is when they verse out.
This is also what I did when I ran Worldwalker the campaign, although in more abbreviated form.
In the story that begins with my tennis playing reporterette getting versed to the Wall at the End of the World verse, I also did this. You establish her concerns and goals such as 1) She wants to become more famous and have better stories and get paid better, and her difficulty 2) She is feeling mistreated at work where she puts in a lot more effort than she gets compensated for. And she's off to get an interview with a mysterious game designer...and Break....she's versed out.
Another way to do this is to have something like the paragraphs I replied to John on the 'List: Breakfast' thread where I showed the new world in its overwhelming weirdness, and then have the hero sit there eating his 'omie', and he quickly summarizes in his mind...
'What's happening? I got up this morning to go to school. Freshman Physics and Basic Calculus in the same semester, what was I thinking I wondered as I scrambled back to get my nearly forgotten books. But if I want to graduated from Roberts in four years with my High Energy Physics major, I have to scramble all the way. Buzzed across town, beat two lights, caught at Morgan and Litcher, and so I decided to take the verboten short cut through the X-ray Lab. There I saw the cute blonde in her so sweet lab coat...I remember tripping. Over an electric cable. And then yellow blobs in white fire, and...Now I'm eating pureed parsnips. Yuck. This is officially my worst day ever.'
At this point, you've established something of the character (harried, ambitious, male, college freshman, intends to graduate with an HEP degree so probably pretty intelligent and fairly logical. Willing to take shortcuts even if the authorities don't like it, if he thinks its safe enough, likes blonde girls on the petite side), and given him potential for some skills... When later in the story you need your hero to build an electromagnet, no one is going to doubt he can do it.
Another type of flashback is more difficult in some ways. You start the hero on the beach just after a first verse. He remembers occasional details from his life as appropriate to the story. I did this a lot with WAW Tadeusz stories as I invented various skills for him to have as I went on.
Yet another type is what I considered for "I, Tadeusz" (yes, the fact that it rhymes with 'I, Claudius' was a definite factor). T arrives fully versed, one might say, in the Multiverse and gets dropped immediately into the soup. This is the story of a hero who is already a hero, and knows the situation.
Another type is the tale told from the sidelines. Watson told Holmes tales. In one WAW, I had a French-Brazillian reporterette who latched on to T, and got dragged into a confrontation with the Forces of Evil.
In "Missing Man" which is another try, the wife is at home with her kids, wondering where hubby went to, and very, very irritated and quite heartbroken at him for up and dissappearing for three days. When he shows up, its been a hundred fifty years for him (only that short time because he got lucky and bumped into a verser who had solved the 'how do you get home problem'), and three days for her, and she's not in the mood to listen...
Its a cross between dealing with MIB's and The Taming of the Shrew. Its a romance novel told from the viewpoint of the wife who finds her husband has changed radically and is now far more competent than he was.
So there's some ways to handle writing the Multiverser novel.
MJ in his delightful novel chose to begin with the characters already in the Verse for several worlds.
To be precise, all of my characters' stories started with their second deaths. That is, they lived in our world (and it is always our world, to provide continuity with the reader), and then they versed into NagaWorld which is captured only in brief retrospective comments, and then they versed into the worlds in which their individual stories begin. Their varying "experience" is based on what they did in NagaWorld--Lauren Hastings went to Umak Tek and did many things there that I did (except she didn't build the city); Bob Slade attempted to pirate parts off one of the machines on the battlefield known as the Industrial Complex; Joe Kondor walked into the Glass City and fought a spider; Derek Brown sat on the grass waiting to "wake up" from the dream until a coral bush happened along and killed him.
I did this because when I wrote the original stories it was still standard that every verser started in NagaWorld, without exception, and I did not want to write adventures in NagaWorld, mostly so that those who read the novels would not learn too much about their first world, and partly because it really is Ed Jones' creation to which I gave little more than framework (although indeed I did build Umak Tek).
Ed was very hardcore about NagaWorld being the starting point for every player. There are reasons for that which I fully understand, but they are not compelling to me and in the process of creating the full rules of the game they became irrelevant. However, even despite the fact that I have used other universes and settled on the Tropical Island as a starting world for demos and online and convention games, it always bothers me when a verser has "never been to NagaWorld", because I still think of it as the first place every verser goes.
(I don't use it thus in conventions and demos because those situations require that versers get killed out of their first world quickly, and not all do so from NagaWorld. I did not do so in online games mostly because I did not want information about the world to be available to those who had never been there.)
So I admit that your process of starting a character from his home world and taking him into the verse rubs against a personal prejudice of mine, but I recognize that it's a Catch-22, because NagaWorld is less your world than it is mine, and you would be forced to treat it much as I do, having your characters start already in their second verse-out with memories of what happened in the world with the orange grass--and that's not something I ought to impose on anyone else's stories, even if I adhere to it myself.
he got lucky and bumped into a verser who had solved the 'how do you get home problem'
Well, that's supposed to be insoluble; but there is a workaround: you can have the verser "return" to a universe exactly like the one he left but that "he" vanished a few days before at the same time that "he" versed out. He might not know that this is not his universe, at least until "his" body turns up, which might or might not ever happen. There was some civil war movie in which the tension was all about whether the guy who "returned home" from the war was really the same man who went to the war or merely a very similar person who took advantage of the fact that a wealthy comrade (I almost said "confederate", but that would have been a poor word choice in the context) was unlikely ever to be reported killed in action.
You also have the problem that that verser will not grow older, and that will eventually become obvious.
The primary argument against the ability to go home is the sheer vastness of the multiverse: if there are one hundred billion worlds that are near enough to the one you left as to be indistinguishable from it based on your knowledge, how do you with any certainty at all get to the one you left? And all notions of matching frequencies or spirit origins or any other "you and this universe are from the same stuff" solutions are inherently excluded by the fact that all universes are "from the same stuff", and those one hundred billion similar ones will certainly be.
--M. J. Young
I do not understand the reason for Nagaworld as a beginning world. To me, the Multiverse is way too large to make that limit. I'd say that there are local nexuses where certain things are more likely to happen, for the local area (and this could be quite large), and Nagaworld is an example of such.
I don't think this problem is that insoluble. Sure, at our tech level, but we're talking about guys who ...stop time for a thousand years on a planet, or turn a star into a black hole...when you have math that makes Stephen Hawkings look like a slow elementary school student, and you've been working on it for three centuries, well...
As to the other problem, I'd say you try to set your lady for a visit to the verse when she gets killed. Sure, she might be eighty-five before that happens, but if she verses with you, you just keep on versing with her until you find a world with a 15@10 magic bias and you cast 'Renew Youth', and then you wash the nasty grey goop out of your hair, and stop pretending to need that cane.
Or you could, if you had a good enough method, verse in, meet the lady, verse yourself out, and she comes with you. If she doesn't, then verse in again, buy lots of chocolate, and verse yourself out again.
In the story I had in mind, the question that keeps coming up is 'do you trust me'?, and she keeps getting forced to say 'yes', and then something even scarier comes along and the question gets asked again,louder. Eventually this leads to him versing out, and her joining him.
Eric--I just sent you an e-mail about NagaWorld that might explain some of that. I'll give the post more attention tomorrow, Lord willing.
--M. J. Young
Fascinating.
I'm not sure if I've said this before, or how original it is, but I tend to see the Multiverse as a bunch of plastic sacks floating in a yellow gold liquid. The sacks are the verses, and occasionally they bump into each other, but mostly the scriff acts as oil between them.
On occasion, a sack may brush a little harder than normal and a weakness may develop. This weakness makes it easier for a visitor to arrive, or for a portal to be created. Gates are created sometimes at points where there is a natural flaw already....kinda like taking a pass through the mountains and improving it with a superhighway.
There are a number of forces that may exist in the scriff, and you might bounce off one verse at an angle to be shot with great speed far across the scriff straight at another verse. Indeed, there are probably living creatures in the scriff, either normal material beings who got so scriff tainted they can't really leave all the way, or natural beings of the scriff.
As you can see, I am somewhat adressing your throwaway point about 'weaknesses in teh world walls.'
What versers are in this conception is Needle and Thread. The verser is the needle. His past lifeline is the thread. Without versers, the multiverse would spin apart. Versers keep it tied together.
Another way to start a Multiverser novel, or at least the first few lines is like the paraphrased from memory opening of "Monster Hunters International".
"Tonight was the day I got to live the American dream. I got to throw my incompetent jerk of a boss out a fourteen story window."
It then goes on to set the normal scene...big, beefy accountant working late for jerk boss in office, and the Break from Norm....Boss calls him into office and starts turning into a werewolf.
So for Multiverser...
"If I had known I was going to die today, I'd have done a lot of things different. I wouldn't have yelled at my sister. I would have kissed my mom instead of waving good-bye from the car. And I definitely would have sped through that yellow light. Let me tell you my story."
And then you go on to showcase our hero trying to get across town to get back to his job, conscientously stopping at the yellow, and getting rear-ended by someone who was trying to run what would have been a red. Then the jerk comes out screaming at our hero, and punches hero in the face with the cell phone in jerk's hand....naturally latest, greatest version of cell phone with 'Scriff Inside!'....
So that means hero and jerk just stepped into the Multiverse together? Great, it's Whisp and Mother all over again.....
Not necessarily. There are "unknown factors"* involved in whether someone who is scriff-infected becomes a verser, so the jerk needn't enter the verse if the author doesn't wish it.
*read: referee's discretion
Interesting. I don't think it has ever occurred to me to verse someone out with a piece of equipment someone else was using. Ed probably did it, though--a lot of his first players were versed out in explosions of experimental military gear.
--M. J. Young