For this, and any other Wacky Writing Ideas, I happily release them into the wild for anyone to use. If you like the idea and want to write it up, do so with my blessing! If you want to change it or use it for something else, have at it! If you really want to do something nice for me, feel free to acknowledge me and let me know if you’ve used one of them (I’ll link to your creative work from my blog). If you don’t feel like it, no worries. If there’re a few comments with enthusiasm for an idea, I may write it up, so please comment if it sounds like something you’d like to read.
Birthright is a Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition campaign setting (a world that you can use to play in). The basic idea is that in the past, during a war, all the gods were destroyed in a blast of divine energy.
The humans who were nearby were also destroyed in the blast, but those on the periphery were infused with divine power, making them super-human. Over generations, these divinely empowered individuals passed their divine spark to their descendants and became rulers in the kingdoms around this fantasy world.
Their powers are tied to the lands they rule and the god their ancestor was empowered by. Through developing their country, they grow in divine strength.
“A Song of Fire and Ice” is George R. R. Martin’s famous fantasy series that was developed into a popular HBO TV series. It put British politics around the War of the Roses into a fantasy setting with dragons, magic, and the threat of ice zombies. It focuses on harsh medieval politicking as various factions maneuver to seize the throne.
The idea behind this combination would be that after an initial event that divinely empowers a hero, a new linage of empowered heroes and rulers is created in his descendants. Each book in the series would follow the next generation of the family.
As the series progresses, they would discover that there are different ways that each individual’s power can grow, and after its growth, the enhanced power gets passed on to their later descendants. In the first book, the divinely empowered hero is just slightly superhuman, while in later books they become increasingly godlike.
In the early books, the world at large is a challenge for the protagonists, while in the later books, their similarly powered relatives serve as their antagonists (and normal humans fade into the background). Much like “A Song of Fire and Ice”, stories wouldn’t be simplistic black-and-white moralities, but instead would come out of reasonable, competing desires.
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