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Spirits, sprites and kin? [brainstorming]

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
For a long time the Spirit of the Land has been an important part of the setting in my WIP. The Spirit is the sum of all of the souls of all of the living beings in the land and there are different spirits for different lands; mountains, forests, plains, cities etc.
The spirits are the main source of shamanistic magic but they aren't individuals in their own right. They're sort of the collective subconscious of their part of the world.
The Spirits of the Land have been part of the wip for a long time, but yesterday I added two semi-related concepts. It was the first time I mentioned wind sprites and soot kin in my writing. I've not put any great amount of thought into those (but I am now) until they just popped up in the text and wanted to be a part of the story.
The wind sprites are sprites and for the moment I'm thinking of sprites as the embodiment of the forces of nature. A wind sprites would be a being of wind or associated with wind. A water sprite (sylph?) would be a being of water running down a stream or of crashing waves. Other sprites could be fire, thunder, lightning, gravity - big spectacular things.

Then there's the kin... The kin are the unwashed bastard cousins of the sprite. They're the embodiment of the forces imposed on the world by humans (and dwarves and elves and anfylk). Soot kin race the subway trains, smoke kin (pollos?) hang out around chimneys. Crowd kin are little pests that like to hang around where large groups of people gather (like commuters etc). Other kin could be noise, pollution and refuse/garbage.

The kin would be to sprites like rabid stray dogs are to wild wolves, like doves are to eagles or like instant coffee to freshly ground beans.
The spirits in turn go way beyond that. If a sprite is a wolf then the spirit would be the feel of the idea of a pack of wolves howling at the moon on a midwinter's night.

This is in no way set in stone and I may very well scrap the whole concept of sprites and kin, but I wanted to bounce the idea around and see what you guys might think of it. What other types of entities could there be? How would you change these to fit into your world.

At the moment I don't have plans to include either kin or sprites as plot devices but I'll be using them as flavor elements now and then.

Thoughts?
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
To sum it up:
- Spirits are of the land.
- Sprites are of the forces of nature.
- Kin are of the consequence of man.
 

Queshire

Auror
hmmm.... that's a bit heavy on the green aesop for my tastes. You mention Spirits based on Cities, and I'm all for that, but a city is "imposed on the world," yet the way you describe the Kin is inherently lesser than the sprites. Now, if you just used soot kin and wind sprites, then maybe just have kin refer to solids, sprites to gas and fluid, or maybe have something else for fluids. I'm all for manmade elementals though!
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
I had to google green aesop as I wasn't familiar with the term but now I know what it is I can see where you're coming from. My intent wasn't to use this to preach environmentalism but rather to present a byproduct of modern day society in a magic infused world.
But, yes, I guess there's a certain amount of environmentalism in there.

I'll also try and rewrite the original post in a clearer more readable way. I'm at the end of an 11 hour night-shift and my head isn't the clearest (but I get awesome ideas about random things).
 
I'm a bit partial to 'industrial spiritualism' - and I like the idea of spirits being formed by industrial processes contrasting with the more traditional 'nature' spiritualism. While I'm naturally cautious about trying to introduce real-life moral issues such as environmentalism into fantasy writing, I can understand what you are getting at with the contrast between the sprites and kin.

However, I'm not precisely sure if I agree that all the kin should be negative to the sprites positive nature. Whilst pollution is of course a factor of an industrial world - there are a lot of positive or 'grey' areas that I feel could form the basis of the kin. Industrial life is very complex - you could for example have a kin of scientific progress - like a spark of scientific knowledge that inhabits the offices of engineers. I don't feel the kin have to be all that negative.
 
("An aesop" just means a moral.)

Be sure you read Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings because... well, because it's a great writer finally pulling out all the stops, but also because its "spren" have their own odd relationship with the world. And with people.
 
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