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 |
A Magikal Wonderland
BrikWars is a marvelous Pandora's box, an endless fount of destruction
and mayhem, where every Koincidence falls in favor of maximum violence,
and 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
absurdity. Rules of continuity and physics are as malleable
as we 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 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.
Brik, Not Brick
| “I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.” |
| - Mark Twain |
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
acts of unconscionable and horrifying violence become '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 |
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 performances 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 children. 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 the primordial toybox, it
doesn't matter if one toy is a fire truck and the other is a teddy
bear, or if two toys are built to incompatible scales or originate
from unrelated eras. It doesn't even matter whether they have anything
to fight about. Pandemonium is an end in itself.
 |
Like
all toys, minifigs exist for the sole purpose of getting themselves
killed in the most entertaining and gratuitous manner possible.
Castle guys blasted by space cruisers? Sounds
great! Sea pirates battling 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. 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 seminal destruction of universe BR 1,978, broken shards of the SpaceMen's reality ripped forwards and backwards throughout their own past and across dimensions, disrupting and shredding the fabrik of the Brik timeline. While the broad strokes of history kept a similar shape, holes torn by chunks of the SpaceMan universe tangled the flow of time with new snarls and dramatic complications.
In the altered timeline of BR 1,979 that formed, the Royal bloodline in their Yellow Castle remained pure and strong, but the countryside of this new reality was overrun with strange flattened trees and the terrifying anthrofig abominations of Furbuland. The hat-based caste system that had maintained civic order in the industrial age frayed at the edges: some minifigs ignored their policeman hats and became drivers instead of cops, while others put on never-before-seen chefs' hats in a direct insult to tradition. Anarchist factions bucked the system entirely, going hatless and wearing nothing but hair like common girl minifigs - 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 coalesced, 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 injections of minifigs and constructions from all the antecedent realities, 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 hat castes multiplied into unintelligible minifig multitudes. The great Yellow Castle became lost to obscurity after the sixth repetition (BR 1,983), and even the mighty SpaceMen finally succumbed to the effects of one broken universe after another, splitting into more and more faction colors, then from colors into Trons (BR 1,987), and finally into the current spectrum of mishmash space factions, far removed from their purist forebears, the undiluted SpaceMen who still erupt at the close of every variation of history to destroy the universe again. |
| (BrikWiki entry: BrikVerse) |
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