The BrikWars Universe
Inhabitants
of a plastic-brick universe heed no laws of logic, continuity,
decency, or moderation.
Unrestricted mayhem is the rule of the day. |
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| “There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” |
| - Douglas Adams |
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| The trappings
of civilization are a fresh canvas upon which the Dimmies
splatter mayhem and chaos in broad juniorized strokes. |
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A Magikal Wonderland
BrikWars is a marvelous Pandora's box, an endless fount of destruction
and mayhem, where every coincidence falls in favor of maximum violence,
where life is cheap, plastic, boxy, and bears only the most superficial
resemblance to our world of flesh and mortgages. Time is marked from
moment to moment by oscillating peaks of melodrama and troughs of
sheer ridiculousness. Rules of continuity and physics are as malleable
as any of us in the 'real' world have learned to expect from a lifetime
of superhero comics, schlocky action movies, and public education
-- and they're always trumped by the dramatic requirements of the
moment and the most liberal application of Murphy's Law. Even the
rules governing BrikWars itself are unresistingly overturned by a
haphazard shrugging of shoulders and the players' mutual whim. Spelling
is consistently poor.
It’s Brik, Not Brick
| “I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.” |
| - Mark Twain |
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BrikWars is spelled without a 'c.' This is not a typo; this is
part of the system's intrinsik nature. BrikWars is about the celebration of
mayhem. It turns a suspicious eye towards infidels who believe that
rules are made to be followed. If there's a "right" way
of doing things, including spelling, BrikWars stands in opposition
to it.
The trappings of reality become 'realistik' when translated into BrikWars'
realms: bricks become 'Brix,' a mechanic becomes a 'Mechanik,' and
unconscionable and horrifying ultraviolence becomes 'Awesome.'
A Tradition of Gratuitous Everything
| “Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.” |
| - Tom Robbins |
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In their most dignified form, BrikWars battles pay witness to
lovingly crafted scenarios and intricate models, presided over by
serious wargamers and careful strategic thought. Such battles, while
common, are largely inappropriate. Dignity and BrikWars go together
like one clone-brand brick with another: while they appear to fit
at first glance, their attachment is brief and doomed to violent mutual
repulsion.
BrikWars battles take place in a world of minifigs, and the minifig
species draws its heritage from generations of hard-fought survival
in the toy chests of six-year-old boys. Whether knights, spacemen,
construction workers, or chefs, their souls thrill with the racial
memory of a time when a toy's highest calling was to do joyous and
bloody battle with all challengers. In that primordial toybox, it
didn't matter if one toy was a fire truck and the other was a teddy
bear, or if two toys were built to incompatible scales or originated
from unrelated eras. It didn't matter whether they had anything
to fight about. Combat and danger were ends in themselves.
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Like
all toys, minifigs exist for the sole purpose of getting themselves
killed in the most entertaining and gratuitous manner possible.
You want to see castle guys get blasted by space cruisers? Sounds
great! You want to watch sea pirates do battle with assault helicopters
armed with laser-guided stealth buzzsaw sharks? Go right ahead!
These are the battles that BrikWars was made for. Minifigs are not
bothered by their own grisly deaths, because they’ve seen so
many of their brothers and friends die in similar fashions and they
know how hilarious it is. Also, unlike green army men (who tend
to get melted) and action figures (with their unfortunate affinity
for getting blown up with firecrackers), a minifig’s later
reincarnation is almost assured, either in whole or in distributed
parts. Hideous disfigurements and glorious deaths are the high points
in an existence otherwise spent lying around bored in a box of unused
bricks.
So if for no other reason, you owe it to the poor guys. Inject
a little joy into their lives by slaughtering huge numbers of them.
| The BrikVerse |
Following the first destruction of the universe in R-1,978, broken shards of the SpaceMen's shattered reality ripped forwards and backwards throughout their own past and across dimensions, disrupting and shredding the fabrik of the Brik timeline. While the overall sweep of history remained similar, holes torn by chunks of the SpaceMan universe tangled the flow of time with new snarls and dramatic complications.
In the altered history that formed, the Royal bloodline in their Yellow Castle remained pure and strong, but in this new reality their countryside was overrun with strange flattened trees and the terrifying anthrofig abominations of Furbuland. In the industiral era, the hat-based caste system that once maintained civic order became frayed at the edges: some minifigs in policeman hats started driving cars instead of becoming policemen, while others put on never-before-seen chefs' hats in a direct insult to tradition. Others still bucked the system entirely, going hatless and wearing nothing but hair like a common girl minifig - even though they were male! Chaos reigned in the streets.
Inevitably, the SpaceMen rose up once again, this time in warships of even greater sophistication and variety, and broke the universe even more efficiently than before. Shards of the second universe ripped forwards and backwards through time, along with extra shards left over from the first universe; Brik history was tangled and disrupted even further.
A new, third history developed, incorporating the broken pieces of the first two. After the third timeline was shattered, there was a fourth, and then a fifth, in never-ending recursion. With each catastrophic iteration, the reformulated universe received unpredictable influxes of minifigs and constructions from all the realities that had gone before, becoming all the more sophisticated and complex. Plants and animals appeared in greater variety, the pure Royal bloodline split into endless factions, and the original handful of citizen castes multiplied into unintelligible minifig multitudes. The great Yellow Castle became lost to obscurity after the sixth repetition (R-1,983), and even the mighty SpaceMen finally succumbed to the effects of one broken universe after another, first splitting into more and more faction colors, then from colors into Trons (R-1,987), and finally into the current spectrum of mishmash space factions, far removed from their purer forebears, the undiluted Spacemen who still always erupt at the close of time to destroy the universe again. |
| (BrikWiki entry: BrikVerse) |
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