#thresholder

[alexanderwales]

The Index

This is an index of things I've written and posted online, with minimal descriptions because most of them have blurbs if you click the link. This list is not exhaustive, especially because there are a bunch of short stories and dribbles in various places. If something you liked is missing, let me know.

Web Serials

Worth the Candle - Juniper Smith is a teenaged Dungeon Master who ends up in a world filled with all the things he dreamt up for his campaigns, along with signs of his friend who died months earlier. This Used to be About Dungeons - Five teenagers live in a house together, bake bread, tend the garden, and occasionally fight monsters in dungeons. Thresholder - Thresholders travel from world to world, fantasy one minute and scifi the next, always encountering an opponent, growing stronger as they battle. Shadows of the Limelight - Fame gives you superpowers, and Dominic just saved the world's greatest hero from defeat in full view of a large audience. Glimwarden (unfinished) - A small town huddles around lanterns that keep the darklings at bay. Four teenagers must grow in power as the darkness encroaches. The Dark Wizard of Donkerk (unedited) - Two men steal a baby from an orphanage, then find out he's too cute to sacrifice and raise him as their own.

Fanfic

The Metropolitan Man (Superman) - Lex Luthor attempts to unravel the secrets of the alien. A Common Sense Guide to Doing the Most Good (Superman) - Superman gets really into effective altruism. Instruments of Destruction (Star Wars) - A fable of project management aboard the second Death Star, through the eyes of Admiral Tian Jerjerrod. Branches on the Tree of Time (Terminator) - Sarah Connor is working as a software engineer at UCLA when a naked man shows up on her doorstep. A Bluer Shade of White (Frozen) - Elsa can make life, and Olaf is smarter than he looks.

Shorts

Eager Readers in Your Area - Artificial intelligence has left authors scrambling for readers. Charlotte clicks on an ad. Variations - An orc visits an art exhibition where she feels out of place. Contratto - Julia takes a job as a marketer, working for the vampires to keep their secrets safe. The Randi Prize - James Randi offers a prize for anyone who can demonstrate supernatural abilities. Coming Home - After a long time isekaied to a fantasy kingdom, an errant father has coffee with his estranged son.

I also post short stuff to this very tumblr, which can usually be found under the #microfiction tag unless I forget. Usually this is mirrored on AO3, unless I'm lazy.

Web Comics

Millennial Scarlet - Lamont Pearce is a gig economy demon hunter whose mother ran a government agency meant to defend against Hell. Worth the Candle - A webcomic adaptation of the web serial

Non-Fiction

The AI Art Apocalypse - Slightly outdated thoughts from 2022. Why to Write a Sex Scene - Observations on the narrative purpose of carnal pursuits. Game Review: Underhill - This review contains no screenshots, because this game does not exist. Writing: An FAQ - Accumulated wisdom from 4 million words and counting. Creating Interesting Magic - A much-requested post on making interesting magic systems (and characters, and plots, and worlds). How to Write a Web Serial - It's both easier and harder than you think. The Trouble with Writing Nazis - On giving villains too much credit. Interesting Things to do with Time Loops - Exploring the boundaries of the conceit.

[snugglesquiggle]

Thresholding Across My Personal Multiverse

Read the full article on my neocities page.

What is a Thresholder? 

Thresholder is a fantasy series by Alexander Wales. The premise is simple: chained isekai. You step through a portal into another world, then a book’s worth of plot happens, then another portal opens, and you get to keep some of the powers and loot you earned from the plot. In each world, you’ll find allies among the locals, some power unique to the world, and sooner or later you’ll encounter another person who stepped out of a portal, just like you.

Except they’re not like you. If you believe in equality, they’ll think it’s acceptable to do the bidding of slavers and bigots. If you fancy yourself a free market entrepeneur, they’ll be a communist who wants to saddle your efforts with labor law and insidious union talk. If you see no issue with eating meat (if “in this world, they butcher and eat animals” doesn’t even occur to you as a observation to make), then you’ll meet a vegan willing to treat carnists with that same callous regard.

Even if the differences aren’t philosophical, you just won’t be able to stand them. They’ll be reckless if you’re careful, blathering if you’re quiet, and don’t even ask their opinion on pineapples on pizza.

You can‍ ‍—‍ must‍ ‍—‍ suppose there’s an intelligence behind the portals. (A guardian of the threshold, if you will). Of all the uncountable places in the multiverse, they’ll plop you down where there’s air to breathe and proteins that don’t prion‍-​ize your biology. The people will speak your language, they’ll probably even be human.

If it can select for all that, of course it can select just the wrong person, whom you’ll have no choice but fight‍ ‍—‍ kill, even. And if nothing else, they will have been through more portals than you, and it came to blows in every world. Why wouldn’t they expect you to be the same as all the monsters and wretches they’ve faced before? Why would they even give you the chance to explain? The portals can turn anyone into a thresholder.

After all, the next portal won’t open until one of you beats the other. If you find yourself in a world of post‍-​nuclear desolation where acid rains from the sky, the only chance of seeing air conditioning again is to kick some ass.

What Is the Squiggleverse? 

Thresholder is inspired by jumpchain stories. Jumpchain usually focus on established franchises. It’s an exercise in a particular kind of power fantasy‍ ‍—‍ what if you could get Naruto ninja training and have a Star Wars lightsaber and team full of Pokémon beside you? How unstoppable could you become after five jumps?

Thesholder is all original worlds, though. (And quite creative ones, I’d say.) Still, it’s the sort of premise that invites you to imagine your own worlds, your own adventures‍ ‍—‍ and I dare say it makes for more interesting hypotheticals to consider than your average jumpchain. Certainly the engine for ever‍-​escalating conflict keeps things moving.

I’m not sure how far most get in those sort of daydreams, though I know of at least one Thresholder fanfic. Personally, coming up with weird and magical worlds is something I’ve spent a good fifth of my life seriously pursuing. I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it, but if nothing else, I certainly have something to show for it.

So, I decided this could be an interesting exercise: how would my original settings stack up as thresholder arenas?

But first, a gesture at ground rules. The number of worlds I’ve “properly” “written” about is rather modest‍ ‍—‍ half a dozen, or more depending on how you count. But there’s a plenty of settings I have detailed notes about it despite having never committed to final draft prose.

I’d be remiss to include the (frankly underbaked) setting of And the Darkling Reefs Abide yet neglect the much more mechanically interesting world of, say, Running Out of Skin & Time.

Will I be dedicating paragraphs to every figment I’ve had a fleeting thought about? No. The loose standard I’m operating off of is I’ll list a setting if I could (or better yet, have) given a thousand word‍-​long rant about its lore purely off the dome. Not rigorous, but ultimately, who cares.

More importantly, if the idea is that I could talk at excessive length about any of these worlds, how do I stop this document from being exponentially excessive in its own length?

I’ll just have to cleave to the essentials of each world. A brief description of its look and feel, and then a rundown of what sort of powers you’ll gain and what sort of dangers you’ll contend with. (In the case of worlds that have changed substantially throughout their history, I might note when there’s distinct “eras” to consider.)

This page will mostly be protracted exposition about my own magic systems, intercut with occasional commentary on the worldbuilding implications of the grand spell. Let that be a warning or invitation according to taste.

Now, let’s get on with it.

...However, I think posting thousands upon thousands of worlds to tumblr is a questionable idea. I don't want to keep this post updated with typo fixes and further edits, and I have a cute little footnote system that tumblr can't support at all.

So you can read the rest on my site.

[alexanderwales]

Unfortunately "war crimes" weren't on the list. In terms of actual crimes he's committed:

Assault

Murder

Theft

Breaking and entering

Spying

Sedition

Insurrection

[annikasevenshots]

So today is the Lunar New Year of the Snake.

It is also, incidentally, Threshold Day.

Therefore, may I suggest

✨ The Year of the Salamander 🦎🧧✨

[maliciousalice]

It could change the very nature of our existence! Happy Threshold Day Everyone!

[thekinglemingle]

“I’ve taken the liberty of ending the monarchy, sir,” said Marchand.

[jone-slugger]

Kate Mulgrew, the woman that you are

[lilvoyagercomics]

Happy Threshold Day to all who observe!

[stinkybreath]

Perry just called Foucault “not that bright” man I hate this guy I hope he loses in this world

[theartmeg]

It's that magical day of the year—Happy Threshold Day! 🦎🦎🦎

I'm celebrating with very silly crossover art. Don't ask me for the logic behind these, because I don't even understand it myself.

[alexanderwales]

I've got a book out today, the first book of Thresholder.

There's a genre of CYOA games called a jumpchain, where the reader picks up powers from different worlds and crafts a character that can steamroll through any challenge, or whatever it is they're in it for. They jump from world to world, in a chain, which is where the name comes from.

This was the starting point for Thresholder, but the more I read up on jumpchains, the more I realized that they weren't actually the thing I had invented in my head when I first heard of the concept. In practice, most jumpchains are at the extreme end of power fantasy, and they tend to be pretty uncreative, or creative only by combination, or because they're written by people who are ignorant of the rules of writing (which can sometimes result in interesting things to read). Of course, most jumpchains aren't written at all, the scenes just exist in the head of the person making point-based selections from a "jump document", and this is a level of arcana around jumpchains that does not remotely apply to Thresholder.

So you have Peregrin Holzmann, who is the worst parts of me when I was in my twenties, a guy who likes to argue with people on the internet, who feels adrift and without purpose, like his whole life is going to amount to being a cog in the machine. He's the kind of guy who's going to answer the call to adventure because of course you step through a mysterious portal, of course you go through it instead of calling someone or risking that it will close.

And the other major thing I wanted from this book, which I think I got, was a chance to just do some rapid fire worldbuilding, to have stories of far-off places with their own ways of doing things: places with gods and monsters, scifi civilizations on the edge of the heat death of their universe, oddly constrained worlds where people nevertheless make a living of it, or sometimes, a wasteland inhabited only by strange creatures that live in heavily decorated holes.

Anyway, I wrote this book, and it's out today, so if you're in the mood for something that blurs the lines between scifi and fantasy, about a man who finds his purpose in moving between worlds with his robot butler, maybe give it a shot.

[snugglesquiggle]

new public chapter of thresholder has a passage that feels like striking a similar vein as corrupt combustion's worldbuilding

“My best guess at what’s happened, based on available evidence, is that it has to do with something happening at the nanometer scale,” said Marchand. “The history of both our worlds featured reductions in the size of microchips. At a certain point, what you call quantum mechanics began to play a significant part in chip design, offering a more accurate understanding of what was happening with the flow of electrons than classical mechanics. At a certain point, quantum tunneling becomes a significant factor, namely ‘off-state’ current leakage. There are also, in some of the microchips, elements that take advantage of quantum effects, particularly rapid flux, the term for which I don’t know in your version of English.” “So the chips are fried?” asked Perry. “They have become error-prone, sir,” said Marchand. “Unfortunately, the errors are occurring within the chips themselves, and because this is a fundamental problem with chip design, it cannot be corrected on that level. Would you like an explanation of the full process?” “Fuck me, but yes,” said Perry. “Keep it short and simple.” “The first step is to create an error map,” said Marchand. “This is possible given that certain parts of the power armor use microchips with a larger gate size, not subject to quantum effects that are likely causing the bit flips. Half of the work consists of running test patterns through each processor multiple times. The other half of the work is in developing error-correcting code implementations, and to do so largely without the ability to trust the processors which are being used to create these codes. Creating reliable computation from unreliable computation is a difficult problem.”

[terristre]

floyd is my dad now

[shisasan]

Ph. tokyoshooter

[captaincrusher]

Happy Threshold Day Eve!

[tuttle-did-it]

THRESHOLD DAY HAS ARRIVED!!!!!