Purgatory Bay - open for critique

[btrc]

[jag]

It's a compelling setting, but one possible inconsistency is bothering me.

It seems that a good fraction of the population of the dystopic Bay would want to be elsewhere.  It also seems that some fraction of worlds revealed by the waning Fog would be passable-to-nice.  Once one of these ok worlds was found, what's to prevent the Fogwalkers from holding hands with a bunch of people and leading them to the new zion?  Wouldn't the population of the Bay drop dramatically whenever this happened?  And that would remove the population pressure and the Lottery that makes the setting compelling in the first place...

james

[btrc]

That's a passably good point. I was sort of thinking that inertia and satisfaction with the status quo would keep a lot of people there. The sky is grey, but the weather is perfect, there is no war, and no one is going to kill you just because you're a pagan or a jew or a gnostic or whatever. All in all, socially it is comparable or better than most of the places you can visit through the Fog. Unless your mundane talents are worth a lot more "outside", why not stay? Many people may also feel a desire to stay based on the religious beliefs in Purgatory Bay.

But, if it turns out to be a problem, Fogwalking could be limited to Fogwalkers, and while they could take a boat, they couldn't take any non-Fogwalkers out on it.

Greg