The Campaign Builder's Guild

Or bats? Not necessarily by instinct, but at least in principle by the mechanics of their wings?

(And not in the vacuum of space, mind you. Just zero gravity)

[ooc]I ran a rather freeform session a few days ago, and this is the document I cooked up in the few hours before it started (I would have made it longer, but  ran out of time). The session went well.[/ooc]

I'm not crazy. These things happened and these places are real. I swear I didn't make it up. Tell everybody. I can't be the only one who knows.

Chassery
What they call the king's language. I can't really spell it properly in English or describe it because it's got all these sounds we don't use. Sometimes it sounded maybe Chinise and sometimes African. Popping, clicking and whistling. We never really learned to pronounce it so people always knew we were very very foreign. That got us in a lot of trouble. But sometimes it saved our lives! Here are a few words:

kwan - Fear. People use it a lot, and stick it in front of other words like we use 'phobia', but it doesn't necessarily mean irrational fear. So kwanbuckoo is a fear of wolves, which makes sense, and kwanmwotissa is a fear of children, which sounded kind of crazy until we heard about the West.

riyo - Water. There are people made entirely of water, called the Riyoyacka. Yacka doesn't mean anything, that I know of. They look pretty much human (and naked too) when just standing around but they throw themselves forward like they've been blasted from a hose instead of walking and they carry objects by wrapping around them even though they have hands. They don't speak. Apparently they don't eat either, and they drown people for fun, and they have a god who wants to drown the whole world. But they seemed pretty harmless to us. Long ago the Bronze Minister imprisoned thousands of them them in the far north where it's so cold they turned to ice. He didn't even need prisons.

teresa - Dollar. It sounds a lot like your name, which Kat always thought was funny but really just reminded me how far away home was. On their coins is a picture of the dead queen. She looks nothing like you.

brurt - Sword. In Cowalkut, people are obsessed with swords. Even very little kids have them, but they're not sharp. There are three types: ijedbrurt for fighting humans, zolombrurt for fighting the dead, and brurt-vol for fighting spirits. We saw men who wouldn't draw a ghost-sword to fight off bandits even though it was the only sword they had, and who got killed because of it.

doorways
I won't tell you how we got there the first time. Even though I could warn you a million times DON'T OPEN THE DOOR and explain all the frightening things we saw and all the sadness and danger maybe you'll do it anyway. We did. Still, if you get there somehow (I don't know how or why but you might) you'll need to know how to get back ou [MISSING] izards will tell you they can help you. THEY CAN'T. Their magic is all about deception and getting power over other people so they want you to put your trust in them and then they've GOT you.

storms
They're alive, and they talk. Their voices are really low and bassy, and no-one but us ever heard them, which is part of the reason people thought we were magical. It's kind of drawn out and mellow and reasuring until you catch what they're saying. Every storm, even the least impressive one, is trying to kill people. Remember Phillip back in school who could never not say what was going through his head? It's like that, only imagine he had a machine gun in his backpack.

wizards
I mentioned wizards before. They're really powerful and dangerous and you should never trust them.

gardens
A lot of people, even really poor ones, have carefully tended gardens. Their whole house could look totally ramshackle but their backyards would win awards. This is where normal people make magic. Flowers grow so huge you can make clothes from them, and you could rest in their shade. Herbs cure diseases and seeds planted in the right spot can grow into weird animals (I sketched a few of them for you). There are trees that can't be killed if the person who planted them is alive, so young men plant them and if they wither and die during a war their families know they're dead. Gardens are such serious business that you wouldn't burn your worst enemy's garden even if you wanted to shoot him in the street.

Lady Rotten
We never figured out why she was after us. She's the dead queen's 'sister' but she supposedly wasn't 'born' until the queen died. I don't get it either. Lady Rotten tried to take the queen's place place but the throne rejected her so she sits beside it instead. She's bloated, rigid and stinks just like her name says. She's not evil, though. Just very very bitter.

The dead queen
We only met the REAL queen once, when she lent us her ship to cross the ember sea. She was drop dead gorgeous and taller than anyone I ever saw, but she looked at us like we didn't exist. For a while she had me convinced that I didn't.

Hacking. Say I want to include it in a game that's not about cyberworlds and gizmogadgets, but it's got them in there. Say it's post-Civil War marvel comics and the hackers are SHIELD agents or whatever. That kind of micromuckery. And it doesn't need to be real, just verisimilar.

What are the fundamental bases I need covered? Talking resources, tech, time.

[ooc]Luminous cussed me out for abandoning Apocodritch Lords. So here is a another magic thing that I will also never finish. It owes more than a little to some musings he made in IRC and I'd quote them if I knew where to find them.[/ooc]

Sorcery uses d6 dicepools; 1-3 is a failure, 4-6 is a success. Sorcery has three core components:
Power/Control/Knowledge

Power (P)

• The number of d6's rolled in the spell, to a maximum of 10D. Each die has an effect, positive with success, negative with failure.
• They are the sum of (1D-3D for each): Ritual, Incantation, Sacrifice, Assistance, Instrument, Ingredient & Deed. These are called Elements.
• A spell's foundational component is its Root: always a Ritual, Incantation or Deed. The Root determines the spell's core function, such as Communion With The Dead or Celestial Summons.
• All Roots have an associated Discipline, such as Thanaturgy or Invocation.

Control (C)

• The number of failures that can be neutralised, to a maximum of 5. It is a fixed value representing one's ability to adapt to a spell's unforseen complications.
• E.g: A magus with C1 attempts Communion With The Dead at P5 yielding two successes. Only one failure can be neutralised, leaving two dice worth of havoc.
• Each Discipline has its own Control rating. E.g: A magus with C0 Thanaturgy and C2 Invocation. Use the lowest relevant Control rating if multiple Roots apply.
• Control is unrelated to Power. A magus with C0 Thanaturgy can still Commune With The Dead if they know the spell, but they cannot mitigate its fallout.

Knowledge

• A magus knows specific combinations of Elements, called Spells.
• For every Element added or altered in a Spell, reduce Control by 1 if it results in a new Spell. Simply subtracting Elements yields no penalty.
• If you do not know the Root you cannot cast the Spell. All but the most introductory texts omit 1D Roots, assuming prior knowledge.
• You can only learn a Spell by casting it.

Consequence
Each die is a thing that happens, or combines with other dice to become an even more significant thing.

Failure

• Each element has its particular failure events.
• If the magus cannot generate successes equal to the Root, the spell fails altogether and none of the successes matter. The failures still apply.
• Root failures are worse than others.

We might imagine a magus specialising in Communion With The Dead, developing its complexity over time until they have a single 10D spell. They would simultaneously have mastered every subset of those 10D Elements. They would only need to improve Control in Thanaturgy. They would be no better at summoning angels than when they started.

This system is designed for wizardly games. Nonmagical mechanics should be heavily abstracted.

[ooc]Yoinked from the tavern to avoid clutter. Might as well get this started already.[/ooc]

Quote from: SAGame mechanics for an entirely psychological setting (thought is reality). The protagonists are quarantined to prevent them infecting the world with their own universe-warping "liberated intellect". It is superficially set in a hyperadvanced Asylum, but the plot mostly unfolds in parallel worlds of indeterminate actuality.

The major task is conceiving gameplay for psychological growth, anxieties, social conflicts, catharsis, community, sexuality, self-defeat. Making a game out of the things we normally leave unattended in the interest of player agency.

Quote from: Light Dragonhttp://www.raikoth.net/Stuff/ddisplayer.pdf Dungeons and Discourse.

Quote from: WeaveI had a loosely similar idea for a game once that I never followed through with: it was based around lucid dreaming in an attempt to imagine a game with non-linear levels and turning real world feelings, anxieties, and other emotions into conjure-able constructs for the player to manipulate and use to solve puzzles, combat, or whatever.

I would probably identify what sort of psychology of the mind you'd be using, like the antiquated and hypersexualized Freudian theories, the bizarre and surreal Jungian mindset of archetypes and personal shadows, perhaps a more Rogerian understanding of personal growth and empathy, or maybe even something more current (it does take place in the future, this could be an opportunity to develop your own crazy theory!). There's really no "wrong" choice there; they are all practices that work  to some degree or another depending on the person... if, you know, that's something you're interested in answering.

Thanks for mentioning Carl Rogers, Weave. I just had a gander at his Nineteen Propositions and they're helping crystallise some of the concepts I'd like to explore. I'm not inherested so much in adopting a psychology of the mind as I am in identifying concepts that are so foundational that they really must be covered. The game is about psychedelic High Fantasy on one side, and on the flipside it's intimate psychological horror straight out of Room 1408 and The Cell. I'm presently considering The Revised NEO Personality Inventory or HEXACO model of personlaity structure for core attributes. Jungian archetypes may also get some play - not as 'foundations' but as transcendental 'destinations'.

And thanks to Light Dragon for Dungeons and Discourse. Aaron Diaz is on another level.

I've got a lot of literature yet to read and welcome recommendations. College is finished for the year so I've got time on my hands.

COCKROACHES DRINK SAKE

Did you know this?

They're practically people.

I'm creating something of a "martial arts" sandbox setting in which to experiment with combat mechanics for my game system. The sandbox is neither tonally nor conceptually related to that system, but the combat mechanics should transfer.

This sandbox is called


It is Street Fighter + Metal Slug + Afro Samurai + Ninja Scroll + Marvel Comics and it is about infinite combat in the Battle Universe.

What I need from you guys is a list of cool fighting archetypes and come characters for reference. Dudes in Combat Mechs and chicks with antimat rifles and eternal demons with fifty arms and biomechanical H.R. Gigerbots with acid-laced scorpion tails are all balanced against each other because the Battle Universe has its own rules. So don't worry about power levels. Strange and original techniques of your own devising are also welcome.

Scribblings, really. Inspired by your settings. If you recognise something feel free to take it home with you.

A magnificent bastard

At least, I was thinking Bastard's Bastards when I drew it.
The aesthetic is probably more WH40K than weird dieselpunk.
You can still have it if you want it, Superbright!
The others will look right I promise...

This is the bastard child of my wizard hack of apocalypse world. It has nothing to do with that system now, and very little in common with the 'cosmic sorcerers' concept of the original hack. What it does have are:

• Warriors who fight world-shaking behemoths on their own terms. Running up dragons' tails in mid-flight and cleaving their wings with broken swords. Wrestling hundred-armed octapus gods at the bottom of the ocean and subduing them in a single protracted breath.
  
  
• Visionaries promising eutopia and forging it with machinery and miracle science.
  
  
• Solidarity and Heroism. The protagonists are bound together by oaths and by their mutual admiration. When every other measure fails they can invoke this fellowship as a fateful source of strength. The protagonists are likewise bound to the world, rising and falling in its esteem as they work their will upon it.
  
  
• Clear, concise mechanics for generating and resolving all of the above. Rules for mentorship, political ascension, alienation, self-actualisation and personal betrayal alongside the more conventional thieving and climbing and exploring and killing. There is still quite a lot of killing.

The system is essentially d20 compressed into d10, with levels commensurately condensed. A simple percentile system with ten discrete and equally apportioned outcomes for any given conflict. It's in its infancy, so any insight or feedback will go a long way.

Classes

Name*	Archetype	Class Skill
Alienist	Summoner, secret-seeker and faustian bargainer	Mystery
Elemental	Living, thinking force of nature	Communion
Engineer	Inventor, gadgeteer and quartermaster	Craft
Eukaryote	The messiah	Empathy
Ghoul	Opportunist, parasite and remorseless social predator	Cunning
Revenant	Scarred, relentless and endlessly adaptive warrior	Vitality
Thane	Servant, builder, broker and breaker of nations	Culture
Zoanthrope	Shapeshifter	Instinct

Only player characters have classes. First level characters are already dangerous, notorious and capable individuals. Each class has a core skill that must be invested in order to advance. Multiclassing is forbidden.

*All names are placeholders.

Abilities

Level	Actions	Feats	Skills	Weapons
1	1	1	4	2
2	1	2	8	4
3	2	2	12	6
4	2	3	16	8
5	2	3	20	10
6	3	4	24	12
7	3	4	28	14
8	3	5	32	16
9	4	5	36	18
10	4	6	40	20

Levels
There is no precise levelling/xp scheme yet. Downtime represents a hiatus of months or years in which the character trains, stars in their own spin-off and generally gets on with their life. Beginning a new level could easily represent coming out of retirement, returning from foreign lands with new knowledge, or battling your way out of the underworld.

Actions
Roughly analagous to an "attack" in 3EDnD. A standard attack consumes one action, while more exotic abilities may cost as many as four. An action can be sacrificed to add +2 to another action in the same turn, or +1 to another character's action in that turn.

Feats
Most feats automatically unlock new abilities as the character levels. Their emphasis is not on numerical benefits. Examples...

Mentor - You have a sidekick who looks to you for guidance and is, generally speaking, a mini-you. If acquiring them during play or during character creaion at level 1, roll Culture, Negotiation or Empathy to determine your initial relationship and responsibilities. This is a Batman-Robin dynamic - if they die or are abandoned or move on you always get a new one.

Living Weapon - Every part of you is a killing instrument. Your unarmed attacks have the reach of a sword and cannot be disarmed. At higher levels, you can punch holes through walls and roundhouse kick demons into unsconsciousness.

Feats are meant to be powerful. You only get six over a career that begins in the gutter and ends beyond the stars, so they're thematically and mechanically substantial. There are no bonus feats. At all. Ever.

Skills

Name	Function	Failure
Instruction	Teaching, allocating tasks and coordinating group action	Miscommunication/Desertion
Clarity	Navigation, memory and the senses	Lost/Confused
Communion	Wilderness survival and animal empathy	Deprivation/Injury
Craft	Creating arms, armour, tools, buildings, machines...	Imperfection
Culture	Language, etiquette, idiom, gossip and first impressions	Shame/Ostracism/Obstruction
Cunning	Deceit, disguise and quick thinking	Enmity/Distrust
Empathy	Understanding people, predicting behaviour and eliciting disclosure	Enmity/Imprinting
Grace	Balance, coordination and acrobatics	Stumbling/Fumbling
Instinct	Reflexes, intuition, self-discipline and inner nature	Panic/Rage/Folly
Mystery	Forgotten and occulted knowledge	Attention/Misinformation
Negotiation	Soliciting favours and haggling prices	Debt
Stealth	Anonymity, concealment and theft	Caught/Cornered
Vigor	Climbing, running, jumping and swimming	Inadequate/Late
Vitality	General health, endurance and stability	Sickness/Fatigue/Collapse

Investing multiple points in a skill unlocks new competencies. Someone with no ranks in stealth can still hide, but someone with 2 ranks can help someone else hide and someone with 6 ranks can hide while being observed. The reverse is equally important: a one or two point investment in a skill is often enough to access all the abilities the player forsees being useful in his career. For example...

Culture and NPC Reaction
When an individual or group first encounters you, your culture roll determines how familiar and appropriate they think your behaviour is (see table below). You can then appeal to the group's collective interest with another Cultural action, appeal to them on a personal level with Empathy, bargain for greater priveleges or a specific resource with Negotiation, or lie about yourself with Cunning.

Result	Disposition	Effect	Diplomacy
11	Respect	They actively solicit your opinion and volunteer information	+1
9-10	Interest	They give your opinions uncommon consideration	0
6-8	Indifference	You seem perfectly mundane and inoccuous	0
4-5	Disregard	They expect you to defer to their judgement and care nothing for your opinion	-1
3	Disrespect	They perceive you as a distraction and inconvenience	-2
2	Disdain	They tolerate you for their own amusement and ridicule you to your face	-2
1	Ostracism	They do not tolerate you even for the sake of ridicule.	-3
0/-1	Scorn	They go so far as to encourage outsiders not to associate with you	-3
-2/3	Malice	They actively conspire to make your life difficult now and in the future	-4
-4/7	Hatred	They plot to cause you physical harm or even murder you	-5
-8	Fury	They try to kill you right here and now	X

As long as you're not rolling at a penalty (usually involving some kind of prejudice) a single rank of Culture obviates the Ostracism result and opens the possibility of Respect.

A Few Modifiers
-2: you are an outlander
-5: you are an old racial adversary; you kick in the door, hollering, screaming and punching faces
-10: you are an abomination in their eyes (demon in a court of angels); you kick in the door and kill an extra
-15: you kick in the door and kill your target's mum

The other social skills are just as important. Negotiation gets you quests and favours, but can also saddle you with responsibilities. Empathy gets you comrades, friends and lovers, and can heal hearts and minds, but can also earn you obsessive dependants and determined enemies. It is also governs 'non-violent' intimidation. Cunning provides plenty of temporary advantages, but always pisses people off in the long term.

I'll talk more about those (and every other damn thing) later. Thoughts?

Quote from: Monte CookThe Ninth World is a science-fantasy setting approximately a billion years in the future. The people of the world dwell amid the flotsam of impossible ultratech of eight prior civilizations and call it magic. Unimaginably huge machines lie beneath the earth, and satellites orbit high above, transmitting a web of data and free energy. Nanotech, gravitic technology, genetic engineering, spatial warping, and superdense polymers allowed the inhabitants of the previous worlds to reshape the planet. Mass and energy were theirs to command.

That's my jam right there.

The concept of lost-and-reclaimed-and-lost-and-reclaimed-and-lost-again knowledge, of whole worlds built upon the detritus of former civilisation, is germane to the works of several members on this board (Steerpike, Polycarp and myself spring immediately to mind). Colour me intrigued.

Achedarah
"False Man/Woman"

Early humanity drank the blood of deposed gods as it flowed into the chasms beneath the world. Thus they gained wisdom and passed wisdom to their children. When they sacrificed their children, part of that great gift returned to the deities wherefrom it was taken.

When predatory animals consume human substance they likewise gain a measure of divine wisdom, but it is fleeting. Only the most ravenous animals consume enough to understand the magnitude of that gift. Having done so they become desperate to preserve it: they stalk and ambush human beings in ever more ingenious ways. They soon discover speech. They lure travellers with feigned pleas of assistance or even make open petitions for a community's fresh dead. At last they discover glamours with which to cloak themselves in human shape. Sometimes they assume the identities of their victims.

The most common Achedarah are wild dogs, wolves, rats and ravens. Mandrakes were also once believed to be achedarah but this has since been disproved. Because the glamour of an advanced achedarah is so difficult to sustain, a creature thus disguised must kill humans with great frequency. Such habits cannot be concealed for long.

False people were ubiquitous during the arterial age, when humankind first drank the Wine of the Gods and did not yet understand the strength of their inheritance.

Kit-himmu
"Solar Parasite"

A creature much like a giant translucent flea, the kit-himmou bathes in sunlight and becomes aglow with solar power. At night it burrows underground to remain undetected, and its stolen light filters into the earth, feeding fungi and other anomalous lifeforms. Many pernicious mandrake infestations have been the side-effect of solar parasitism.

The solar parasite is an aberrant variation of the luminescing starbeetle, a more benign organism that draws its energy from starlight. The kit-himmu's mastery of luminal energies far exceeds the starbeetle's: it can conjure prismatic phantasms, alter prevailing light conditions between blinding brightness and artificial night, and project beams of solar fire. There is no established upper limit to the age, size and power of a solar parasite: all known specimens to date have been actively sought out and terminated. None exist in captivity.

Ooede
"Amphisbaena"

Ooede have the bodies of long winged serpents, with eyeless heads at both ends. They feed on the dense luminal substance called monochromatica, which is abundant among the crevasses of Moon, and can convert this material into the more rarified chroma. The ooede's common name "amphisbaena" means "going both ways". They are called this partly because of their two heads, but moreso because they have mastered using both chroma and monochromatica to produce complex illusions and temporal-spatial transmutations.

Amphisbaena communicate visually, with elaborate phantasms. They cannot understand human languages at all.




Udthante
"Theomachy"

The gods descend into madness after a million years of ennui, and slaughter one another.

The most-ancient-ledger is destroyed, so that the conditions of their rise and fall cannot be recreated.

Engra
"Arterial Age"

Protohumans consume the flowing blood of gods and become Human.

The city Abundant Nectar is founded, thrives for nineteen years, and is destroyed.

All the technologies of that city are lost and will not resurface for a millennium.

Lady Mobbu mothers the Eight Splendid Generals. They divide the known world between them.

General Erket-Mobbu creates the sublime script from a fragment of the most-ancient-ledger.

BLACKFATHER curses the world, summoning ever watchful Moon to haunt the sky.

Feancatton Byata
"The First Year"

The old calendar is abandoned. A new one is created to mark the phases of Moon and to tally her abuses.

Tiny Ufue founds the first college of the grey art. It specialises in the study and destruction of monsters.

Oapa the Grand Magister invents the strange fruit, from which sorceries are drawn.

Zwolong Byata
"The First Age"

The ooede arrive from another world and make their cities among the mountains of Moon.

Using strange fruit, countless humans take to the sorcerous art. Monarchs license the practise after failing to stamp it out.

Sorcery replaces human artifice. Nations grow fat and indolent. New altars are built to the slaughtered gods.

The instruments of Abundant Nectar resurface in the hands of revolutionaries.

Ap Teunchen
"The Last War"

It is called the Last War because there has not been one since, not because there will be no others.

[ooc]Hey Luminous, I bet you thought it'd never happen, but here it is, piece by jagged piece.[/ooc]


BOOK ONE is a revenge tale
Act 1 - The One Who Calls the Storm
Act 2 - The Executioner's Daughter
Act 3 - A Queen in Grey Raiment

BOOK TWO is a story of pure adventure
Act 1 - Experiments in Volumetric Orthography
Act 2 - Toward a Syntax of Four Dimensions
Act 3 - A Grammar of Formless Expression

BOOK THREE decides the fate of everything
Act 1 - They Set Sail on a Sea Without Water
Act 2 - ...Whose Corpse was Found at the Foot of the World
Act 3 - A Devil Took Root in the Coolness of His Shadow


bar-et (om-beh-ral): A genius practitioner of hen-gan who sold her comprehension of the art to whoever could afford it. With her resultant fortune she purchased several ships and a company of mercenaries, aspiring to join the ranks of merchant lords, but other hen-gan adepts, already affronted that an om-beh-ral should be so profligate in her proliferation of the art, conspired to destroy her. Now she is both shamed and destitute, her house gutted of its possessions and her slaves disbanded. Only her grand slave Fandhit and the vagabond assassin Camerron remain as allies, and Camerron cannot be trusted.

Fandhit (dwarf): A mathematical and linguistic prodigy, whom bar-et purchased at market when she saw that another customer was prepared to squander the child's talents on manual labour. In his youth he spent much of his time devising puzzles and mechanical amusements for his mistress, until at age 32 he became her grand slave. When the conspiracy of merchant lords destroyed bar-et's fortunes it was Fandhit's ingenuity that facilitated her outrageous scheme of revenge. Now 61 yers old, Fandhit bears all of life's vicissitudes with an often bitter amusement, and in his years of service he has cultivated a tortured, intimate familiarity with the politics of nar-en-in.

Camerron (human): An incorrigible liar with a temper that smolders and seethes. Though not legally bar-et's slave, he has served as her informant and assassin since he was orphaned at six years old. He does not know that she was the one who ordered his parents be beaten to death, and with all that she has given him it is uncertain how he would respond to such a revelation. At 27 years of age he his huge, hardened and scarred, missing three fingers and four teeth, yet he has a keen social sense and a veneer of affability that conceals his brooding humours and penchant for violence.

Camerron's unofficial name at the gaming table is "Sexy Bill Sykes"

Jaifi (goblin): A gunslinging mercenary with burn scars over two thirds of his body, though thankully, as he is quick to remark, "not where it matters". He does not appear until Book Two, Act 1: Experiments in Volumetric Orthography.

Indyiris (human): A childhood survivor of the Ithyrian genocide and an active Locksmith of shallow allegiance.  She does not appear until Book One, Act 3: A Queen in Grey Raiment.

[ooc]You won't know nuthin' bout this, unless you know sumfin' bout this.[/ooc]

ANANDA
an unopened book
...your forefathers cleaved to that solitary earth and feuded over it but no-one possessed the strength to claim it. Their wars were the same as our wars, as was their science, and their souls were just as hungry. The bomb lying pitted and expired in the ravine beside our village shrine (I know that you have played there though I tell you again and again that it is dangerous) is not much changed in design from the ones they used to destroy cities in the years before it could be done more cleanly with whispered curses.

At last they discovered sorcery and they believed that it would end the world, but when they sank whole cities and cleansed entire nations from the earth in preparation for that end they did not do it with magic but with their old familiar instruments. Science neither surrendered nor was reconciled with magical law.

SANKHARA
a nameless creation
Every earth on which men dwell is an imitation of the first. Perhaps it is prideful to call Earth the original at all: many other worlds are more ancient, and some that spin beneath younger suns and closer stars have seen more trouble in those brief lives.

Your forefathers entered these worlds by magic and found that magic had preceded them. Familiar continents swarmed with deranged ecologies. There were self-mobile jungles and autonomous hills; wyrms, wendigos, blood moths, seelies and mandragoras. In the sea were leviathans, while unimagined things slept in the uttermost trenches.  And there were yet other creatures, more mundane but made monstrous by their closeness to our own shape.

But there was also clean fuel and wide open space. Fresh water and fresh beginnings. Nations – or the promise of nations – untouched by tyranny, religious terror or the memories of old spoiled blood. For such possibilities men settled these worlds until the masters of our first earth saw these successes (small as they were) and purchased or killed for those half-tamed portions of virgin world.

That is how the New Societies were made. Wuzhen and Jerusalem and Kolkata. Surat and Guangzhou. Ananda and all the other damned cities.

SAMSARA
an unquiet garden
Beyond all the earths on which your forefathers have stood there are cultures built by altogether different races. I suspect that they are our cousins: changed by miracles as their very worlds have changed, yet ultimately men and worshipers of God. But they have done things that we could not and would not do, even with all the wicked strength which magic has given us.

At Earth's behest we waged war against one such race and whole worlds were damned by that war and its devices. Nothing was gained. Earth's final gift to us as the actors of their will was to close their gates to us, and to the demons and chimeras and contagions of their own creation.

SIDDHA
the lords of all worlds
If the lords of that faraway culture were as strong as we believed, I do not think we would be alive to speak of them. You have seen their bones out in the field: how small they are, and twisted by infirmity.

We know that they are not our only cousins. Other cultures, stranger and crueler - and yes, often kinder - are scattered across the multiverse beyond all the measured territories. What are their designs and what is the limit of their sorcery? What ancient enmities have they cultivated in the days before the birth of our own world?

When I was young I wasted many hours on that question. Later, I encountered such a magus as might have sprung from one of those venerable Earths and after surviving that disaster (though barely, and not entirely whole) I determined that the answer was not worth its inevitable cost.

MOKSHA
time's broken arrow
[spoiler=THE FIFTH, UNKNOWABLE PART]
Each moment and each micron of the cosmos stands alone so that even the gods can know only the tiniest part of reality. The further from their own vantage that they cast their vision the more varied and uncertain is that sight. Forward or backward, time is not made of promises but probabilities.

That is why when the humankind of the final days of the universe opened the way out of space and thereby Time to journey backward into their own history, they could not find that history; only the unnumbered and miscellaneous pasts that might have shaped their present state. By traveling such pasts they made them real, and they fertilised those ages and those worlds with their magic so that wild things grew there.

You might ask if, being the invention of Later Humanity, our own age can lay claim to a history of its own, but in asking this you have not understood the lesson. Our heritage was never more false or real than theirs and neither is our future. If they – our predestined selves – did not journey here to discover us they might never have exist at all.

These are the deeds of beings who are farther from us than we are from dust, so do not ask how I can possess this impossible knowledge. If you tell your father what I have told you I will pretend ignorance and he will beat you.[/spoiler]

[ooc]Inspirations

Films
Monsters
Predator
Pan's Labyrinth
The Chronicles of Riddick
The Fountain

TV Series
Firefly
Stargate SG1

Video Games
Metro 2033
Arma 2: Day Z
Dark Souls
The Last of Us

Tabletop RPGs
Ars Magicka
Diaspora
Dogs in the Vineyard

Comics
Witch Doctor
The Filth
Who Is Jake Ellis

ARGs
SCP Foundation[/ooc]

I am building a science-fantasy survival setting with horror elements, inspired principally by Firefly, Ars Magicka and Metro 2033. Does anybody know of some good music that evokes the uneasy solitude of the survival genre or the trepidation of an unfamiliar world?

At the moment it's mostly the soundtrack to The Proposition on an infinite loop, which is making me depressed.

Strange, unsettling and inspiring "archetypes" to serve as pseudo-character classes (playbooks) in my sorcerous hack of Apocalypse World. My stock thus far (all names are working titles):

Revenant – left for dead, or indeed long dead; raised again and sustained by unhuman passion.
Alienist – in communion with strange races above and below reality.
Zoanthrope – shape-shifter; summoner and breeder of beasts.
Geometer - builder and breaker and twister of spacetime.
Ghoul - consumer and defiler and controller of the dead.

There should be no "-mancer", divination-style archetypes. All playbooks will have their own version of divination, tied to their core concept.

I'm building a setting that my players have described as World of Darkness in Space (Principally incorporating Vampire, Mage and Werewolf).

I would like the vampires to be very similar to the source material, but I'm not sure how they should operate on the dark side of tidally locked planets, wherein their impulse to retire with the coming of the sun would be entirely absent, or on the light side where it would be constant.

Should I simply ignore this entirely, so that they are never required to "sleep"? I know I don't want them to have anything like a human "sleep schedule", but I would like to preserve the suspenseful image of an intrepid mortal or conniving kindred creeping into a vampire lair and staking the dormant monster within.

Other issues, like their response to the sun out in the vacuum of space are easily resolved.

[ic=The Book of Images]It is the oldest of all books, and nearly the most dangerous. The things written in it exist only upon its pages and cannot survive the closing of the book, so that those who seek its wisdom can only know it when they hold the book open before them.

If you see a woman or man who is bent over a text broader across than a child's widespread arms, who turns its leafs with tireless and desperate urgency and no force short of murder will persuade them from it: that person is a devotee of the book of images and they have spent so many days in its mysteries that all their memories are of it. If they close the book they will have no memories at all.

You will not encounter a complete copy of this book. It is most often found in small folios of a dozen pages or so. This is nevertheless sufficient to entrap a fragile mind.[/ic]

REALMS
Yellow Emptiness – home of the black-skinned immortals and the numagh.
LESSER HEAVEN – the threads of unreality bound tightest to the familiar world.
Sunken States – where the earth deepens and twists like a whirlpool, winding towards Caldera, the Swallowed City.
Millipede – the country of giants and mortals and the gas-borne chemsis, who are distant cousins of the anarchs of Iounennion, and, like them, build their tower cities from mucus and mud.
Fulminant Plain – domain of the samkha, the ever-glowing people. It is also called the White.
VUH – the starry kingdom.
Datdaia – the kingdom within the shallow sea.
Sundered Islands – a vast and perilous archipelago, native realm of Setthsimha, the shay and uncounted other peoples.
Caterpillar – the easternmost islands of the sundered Isles.
Pars – fallen city of the cursed queens. In later ages it would become the gold city of Pey.
Iounennion - the Rain City, built out of the ocean's fundament, it thrusts out to the very stars. Its builders have etched themselves into its walls.

And others...

AGES
Tumbling EON – the former age, at the closing of which the glass god IY was smashed apart by His covetous sibling.
The Arterial Age – the current age, in which the Blackest Gods are sustained within the world by gifts of mortal blood.
The Age of Hours – an eon in the midst of the Arterial Age in which the twelve mechanical lords staged a coup against Verter, king of eons and bound the ends of a single century into an inescapable circuit.
ESCHATON – the very last age.

SPECIES
Sangheil – chitin-backed drummer people from the Tunnel Between Worlds. They clothe themselves with the very hills and carve their own living gods from the faces of mountains.
Iysir – children of IY. The self-declared "human race".
Abalsthefon – also "wotolvirpi"; the giant race.
Obgayu – mongrel slave children of the abalsthofon.
Cgon – many-armed people of the sea – the NAVARCH is of their breed.
Jaun joutra – cousins of the iysir, yet bound to a very different destiny.
Dfan – immortal wanderers of the broad yellow country. Painted black, with eyes blacker still.
Cruhhi – spindle-bodied sorcerers; the strongest and foulest of the dfan.
Nurnagh – the incarnate mortality of the dfan, excised from the very souls of those ageless folk and cast into the deepest wastes to wander in the shadows of pitiless empty cities. They are also called the dire folk.
Anarchs – builders of the Rain City. They wove themselves into its architecture as wriggling bas reliefs so that they might better comprehend its endless computations.
Samkha – molten and glowing, the pit-city Caldera is of their making, though it is now held by another race.
Shay – sometimes feathered, sometimes borne on filamentous wings. Always flitting between the grand towering trees and peerless fungal stalks in the deep of the Sundered Isles.

And others...

GODS
Abbal and Wotolvop – the giant gods; siblings, lovers and mortal foes. Their troubled union is emblematic of the giant race as a whole, who are fractious and needful and bound to a common doom.
BLUE SKY – the monarch of heaven.
NAVARCH – a mollusc-god and fleet-admiral of the Chiming Sea.
Cromlier – a titanic god carved from mountains in the image of the drummer folk.
The Middle Gods – Grievance, Avarice, Restitution, Charity and Abnegation.
COLOUR – the gods of colour at the beginning of time, when they held one shape.
The colours – Red, Yellow, Blue, Green and Violet. Eternity, Alteration, Attention, Imitation, Insurrection
Indigo – the renegade colour and autarch of the Abandoned Vertex.
The Hours – twelve machine lords that ruled a stolen century in the middle of the Tumbling Eon.
The Blackest Gods – the champions of imagination who safeguard mortal dreaming and hold the Images of the world between their many hands. They are the wisest and most horrid beings in all creation.
ULONG – the seed of all life. Or perhaps the totality of living things.
NEGATOR – a hollowness surrounding and permeating all materiality. What remains when the myth of MAHA is torn away.
MAHA – the formless one above all other things.
Fivefold Elder Sky – a regal vision dreamed up by the starry-gowned sorceress Kmemy. Kmemy plucked that image out of her fancies and transformed him into a free-willed being. She had three daughters by him: Tizdu, Gunketri and Fyoh, the latter going on to found the witch city, Pars.
Cassipode – autarch of pride and callous murder.
Keththirha – a being of unblemished crystal. Once human, or else shaped in imitation of that race.
Volp – the carrion king. A huge and ravenous bird bathed in blood, ceaselessly chattering.
Verter – fourfold autarch of Time and the Elements, by his own arrogant declaration.
Haoloon – the crawling cadaver monarch. Whither it goes the land becomes alive and gnaws at every moving thing. Scholars vigilantly plot its path and when it threatens collision with civilised places they conceive great diversions to drive it onto some other course.

[ooc]This setting is the evolution of my wizard thread, and incorporates much of the mythology established in play by my gaming group over the last six years.[/ooc]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPQ99y8KaTU

And with that, the spirit of Fantasy departs Hollywood forever.

Ninja D!
If Katy Perry comes on the radio and I no longer feel sick over the fact that I'm listening to terrestrial commercial radio, that doesn't quite classify my as a Katy Perry fan, does it?

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar
There are worse things to be than a Katy Perry fan.

Roadkill, for instance.

Ninja D!
I've never had the desire to buy one of her albums or anything, I just don't feel like beating my head in with a rock when she's playing. That's different from how I usually feel when listening to your average pop radio station right now.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar
We generally get too carried away with our disdain for modern pop. Is it good? No. Not at all. Is it fundamentally any worse than, say, the tapping of tree branches against your window? Probably not. It's just noise.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar
The most that ought to be said about pop radio is that you're better off listening to dead air. But that's true for just about anything on the airwaves, radio, television and internet alike.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar
Present company excluded

Kindling
Heh, that Leicester thing reminded me of a story about an Australian calling some train company to ask how to best get to a place called "Loogaburrooga"... meaning Loughborough (in reality, pronounced more like "luffbruh")

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar
It's like the deeper you get to England the less sense the English language makes.

LordVreeg
indeed. And we can carry that into a lot of places.

Light Dragon
Oh, I have over 25 plays of E_T (without Kanye) on my computer over the past week. So I clearly disagree. And Katy's other songs are strongly in my most played list.

Luminous Crayon
It's too bad she suffers from such debilitating, mind-crushing hypocrisy, I guess.

SDragon
There's two key differences between the pop music of Katy Perry and, as you said, the tapping of tree branches against your window. The first is that someone-- multiple someones, in fact-- went through the time and effort to create, produce, and distribute Katy Perry's music. The second key difference is that many, many people actually spent money on it.

That said, i don't have a problem with pop as a genre any more than I do with, say, rap as a genre. There is some potential in it, but unfortunately, most of the artists settle for only enough of that potential to make them rich.

Llum
Lol wow so much Katy perry hate!

Elemental Elf
- I kissed a Dwarf and I liked it
- The taste of his mithril chainmail
- I kissed a Dwarf just to try it
- I hope the wood elves don't mind it
- It felt so wrong
- It felt so right
- Don't mean I'm in love tonight
- I kissed a Dwarf and I liked it

Luminous Crayon
*dedicates video to project encouraging bullied gay teens not to commit suicide*

*hit song "ur so gay" opens with "you should probably just hang yourself"*

*inconsistency? what inconsistency?*

Ninja D!
I haven't heard that one but a quick search says the lyrics are, "I hope ypu hang yourself" which still isn't good but there is adistinct difference.

Luminous Crayon
What's the point of splitting hairs over that? It's not better!

The Meanest Guest
I'm pretty sure that song is actually about metrosexuals or something.

Nomadic
I view most pop the same way I view most modern art. It isn't about expression it's about getting enough blind fans to give you money and make you rich. Very few pop "artists" are artists at all. No respect for creativity any farther than how it can make them wealthy/look talented

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar
Indeed. We, as a community (of consumers at least, if we possess no other solidarity) are willing to swallow it, so the merchants will peddle it. Your music is like your politicians and your drinking water: only as good as you demand.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar
And yes, "Ur So Gay" is about some chick hating on a metrosexual. Got to love the popularisation of that word as an all-purpose slur. Don't worry my homosexual friends! One day you'll get something catchy and simple and we won't steal it and butcher it (and with it your dreams of public respectability)!

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar
(By which I of course mean "we definitely WILL". We're waiting on the eaves, nets ready. You odd fellows haven't a chance.)

Light Dragon
You do realize that the term "gay" was originally used to mean "happy", so it's already been "stolen" and "butchered" at least once before (using your terms). / Also, don't see what being offensive has to do with the quality of what someone's music sounds like-it's a non sequitur- you can argue that you dislike the artist because of that, but it has nothing at all to do with her songs (other than the offensive song). / Also, why does being "creative" matter- as long as people like what you make and buy what you make, that sounds much more worthwhile than the work of some Indie artist who no one will ever hear because he's so Indie no one can 'understand his soul'  (a real Nowhere Man, if you will).

Luminous Crayon
I'm not arguing that her music's bad (that's another conversation); I'm arguing that her method of self-promotion betrays a pretty deplorable set of ethics.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar
Oh everybody knows that by now, Light Dragon. My point, rather, is that we use it specifically because of its more contemporary association with homosexuals. That's uncool.

And to LC, all I have to say is "welcome to the twentyfirst century."

Luminous Crayon
Touché, et chagrin.

Light Dragon
LC= Okay; the way I had read I thought you were conflating the two; I have no opinion about her methods of self-promotion, so in that case I have no quarrel with you.  ; Salacious Angel- well, maybe anyone over 30 knows that, but I've found that it's not a good idea to overestimate the erudition of most people  , sadly (and it seemed that you were ignoring that old use even though I figured you knew of it--given your utilization of language you almost certainly had to know of the lexicographical origin of the word--so I feel justified in calling that out). Still, although I might tangle academically in support of neologisms and new ways to use old words; you won't see me using the term in a pejorative sense for a variety of reasons, so in that fashion, I also do not appear to have a huge disagreement with you. Now, let's go out together and take a drag a fag (archaic term for: cigarette of all things).

I recall someone(s) on this site studying this subject. Any books you could recommend to a prospective autodidact?