Frightful Boredom-1

Hartford, a soft-dystopian world of modern fantasy in which magic and monsters are ordinary to the point of being passé.

Type: Blossom

Active Characters

No current characters.

Overview

This is a world which looks like another iteration of early-twenty-first-century Earth, but it grew up with magic, fantasy, and nonhuman magical beings as a part of people's everyday lives. Many forms of technology are augmented, changed, or completely replaced by magic; vampires and ghouls and phantoms need to get their driver's licenses updated with a date-of-death; and computer systems have age-fields which support up to five digits, because that's a realistic possibility. Our story begins in the year 719 of the Fourth Age.

Terminology

Magic is so ordinary, they had to come up with an entirely new vocabulary for things which are impossible, given that "supernatural" and "magical" are simply the names for ordinary things which happen all the time. "Fantastical" is the term for preternatural phenomena which can't actually happen, whereas "supernatural" is simply the technical umbrella term for all such existing effects; "miracle" is some impossible effect where "magic spell" is simply one of the ways you can interact with the world; and "monster" is a slightly rude term for nonhuman supernatural beings.

The Hartford Empire

This version of Earth is currently named Hartford, after the vampire Emperor Jeremy Hartford I (though this doesn't stop anyone from calling it Earth anyway), who established Connecticut as "the capital state of the world" solely so that he could rule from its capital city. He controls the world primarily through economics, surveillance, and fewer restrictions on who vampires are allowed to drink from; people who try to cause problems get hit with sanctions which are somewhere between passive-aggressive obstruction and destroying their lives. It's only just gotten close enough to the level of trouble that might make people want to do something about it, but there haven't been any successful rebel groups so far.

Integration

Before the world blossomed, there were of course many theories about the existence of a multiverse, but nobody had much in the way of actual evidence; from those whose theories happened to be correct, the reaction was more-or-less "Ha! Called it!" rather than any clear validation. Blossoming hasn't actually changed much for anyone, being that blossoming is simply another supernatural phenomenon. On the other hand, generally non-magical worlds might cause some confusion; it would be like a world that didn't have weather. The Hartford Empire has designated a few ambassadors to start looking into other worlds, and authorized them to take control of anything that might be profitable for the Empire, i.e. worlds with higher technological or magical advancements. Visitors to this world tend not to be noticed as such unless they specifically call attention to it, due to the wide variety of beings living in the Hartford Empire. Some historians believe that the Blossoming should be considered the dawn of the Fifth Age, but this is controversial.