The Campaign Builder's Guild

[ooc]This is a world of a thousand million epochs. Each epoch is its own world. Which are the early ages and which are the latter days? I don't know.[/ooc]
There was a mortal wizard, a disciple of the strange design, who was feared and admired across the world for his wisdom and his elegant sorceries. But he was also called a fool because he believed in the stories of the old people, who lived a very long time ago if they lived at all, and they had left no sign of their time on the Earth. The other learned disciples and the faithless dilettantes all wondered at this and said 'how can such a clever man as he, peerless in this wide earth, believe in silly fairy tales?'

And they would sit all night with him at the hologrammic forum and debate the magic ways, marvelling at his wit and devouring his every word, but when he would say 'and these things are known by the sacred numbers and by the pictures in the blood and by the words of the old books' they would interject: 'old master, even the gods do not read the old books,' and they would try to wear him down with futile logic. The wizard would smile then, and his companions could only wonder if he had some secret proof, while his enemies sneered and said 'this man is a lunatic! He should not have license to do sorcery.'

And one day when the sun was nearly risen and his friends had quit the place for their much belated rest he sat alone on his favourite seat in the hologrammic forum staring at the light as it grew between the skyscrapers like water rising through cracks in the earth. He had a very old stone in his hand that was carved like a woman or a bird and it was so old that whenever he looked upon it he felt all his many years falling away, and he was like a child. And when he looked upon it his heart grew light, so light he felt a ghost was in him, and it caused him such pain that he cried out and said 'old ones! Mothers and fathers of the world! I am your servant, as are all who travel hidden ways, but I do not know you at all.'

And the lady Setthsimha chanced to hear him from her grove of blood-soaked cryanthemums and her heart was filled with dark compassion. She summoned the wicked lapitateru and instructed it thus: 'there is a mortal weeping in the later years of the world for want of mine and my sibling's beauty. Go before him and show him the way to us so that there may be one among the sons of man who knows the true face of Earth.'

And the wicked lapitateru departed and went before the weeping wizard, and it said 'your mother has not forgotten you, little one.' And it extended its fleshless claw which the wise man took, and they walked out of the hologrammic forum as the sun crept swiftly toward their feet. And the wicked lapitateru showed him the way out of the sunlit city and out of the world, into the lands of gentle summer beneath a mirthless moon.

And for ever after there were men who remembered. And never again was there peace in the later years of the world.

[ooc]With that one I was thinking of Pan's Labyrinth and Hellbound Heart. The next ones were quasi-stream-of-consciousness, so please forgive the shitty grammar.[/ooc]
We immortals are the human race entire and all the majesty of heaven is in our smile. We are the angels of their past and the devils of their future and the lovers and liars whose words they cannot refuse. We are of their flesh and yet not flesh for we are light and dust and dark and doom and glory woven in a fabric of mortal seeming. On our brow we wear the mark of GOD. The seal of hell and fey and the faithless saints coils in patterns round our spirits like a chain.

We are born to rule mankind and we need not love them for they are worms in our sight and though we speak a human voice and love human things and live human lives our lives are forever and they are only our shadows. We walk out into the wild cities of these later ages and the gangsters and warlocks and strumpets and minstrels and vagrants and urchins and market men all fall down in the water-slurried ash and cry out for their salvation and we the deathless ones laugh because we are not messiahs and the old stories are false and GOD is not a liberator and our everlasting rule shall bring everlasting misery and somehow all of humankind rejoices.

We are the warmongers and sorcerer kings. In one hand we will hold the standard of Creation and from the other we will pour like piss and blood all the fires and strife of the End. And that will be our story and the story of the world.

The endless are of a thousand different kinds and their minds are pulled in a million directions. They are people of shadow liquid and fleeting. They are people of fragile earth and formless air crumbling and keening and tenuous. They sing hateful songs and the stories they tell when the night is deep and the hour is thin and frail so that their voices creep into the world like a despairing wind are stories of their own doom as much as that of their enemy.

They are called the fair ones and they cry and maim themselves and burn out the eyes of their children so that they cannot see how their mothers and fathers have wasted the world in debauchery and sloth and they cut off their own weathered skins to forget their age and look at their flensed faces reflected in their blood and say how beautiful am I but all the while their tears fill their halls and flow out crashing into the dark where slowly a great ocean is forming.

They are called the dreamers and their kingdoms are their beds of clinging gleaming web that sink so low with the weight of their lust that creatures of the deep hells can trace patterns with their fingers on the very feet of their realms so that a shudder rises through the world and the spirits fly from their roosts among the mountains and the woods and the rain rotted metropolises rising like startled birds toward the smiling sun.

They are called the forgotten and their bodies are lucent shells marching in grim succession as each shape casts off the last and those forlorn vestments cry out against their emptiness and look hungrily at men and their fleshly warmth and their ghostly nothing hearts begin to quicken to the matching tempo of the world which shares their hunger and they go out amidst the living filled with terrible need and they are unseen except by their bloody prints on the stone that might have been the feet of an infant or a wolf but they are fading fast.

They are called the dire folk and they hunt each other in the close crushing alleys of their limitless cities and their knives are shards of the last sundered moon or lashes plucked from sleeping devils and they stab their brothers in the gullet and wonder at the light that passes from their marble faces and it seems as if their eyes reflect a castle falling or a child wailing and abandoned as it stumbles through the ruin.

And they are called a great many other things by themselves and their sisters and their enemies. And their number fills the world from the yellow glaring pit to the black blue sky though they are invisible to us. And they are our enemies for all of time. And they are endless.

[ooc]And here's (http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/524960) something completely unrelated.[/ooc]

So there are humans who have become immortal, and walk amongst mankind but don't feel like one of them anymore? And the names in italics are the different types of immortal wizards?
Also, some linebreaks in the introduction would be preferred.

I loved the story with the wizard. That's all I can really say, but wow that was good.

Quote from: NomadicI loved the story with the wizard. That's all I can really say, but wow that was good.

I think it was about a faerie queen. Not sure, but I think so. The hologrammic forum reminds me of Rome or a place where technically assisted magical dialectic could be conducted. More in the next post.

A disciple of the strange design

The traditional magic is high magic or Theurgy, wherein individuals invoke the powers of the gods and the Tetragrammaton. The dark side of Theurgy is Goëtia, the low magic, involving dealings with worldly creatures and degenerate gods. Very little of the Goëtia remains and its practitioners are not reviled only because people have forgotten how powerful it once was.

The strange design suggests images of some sort: perhaps ancient mandalas which can be interpreted for divination, or created (as with Buddhist sand mandalas) for magic rituals, or used to  explain cosmology to occult students. It is a Theurgic discipline when depicting divine images; Goëtic when its components are original or used to describe fallen beings and earthly creatures who, by tradition, are not worthy of representation  within the strange design.

The old man is described as a disciple, again suggesting his dedication to the high magic. However, he performs 'elegant sorceries', and sorcery is low magic.

Stories of the old people

The old people are the lords of the earth even in an age that has forgotten them. They are misremembered in the 'old books', non-canonical comedies of error and darker cautionary tales that form an early mythic cycle in the history of the gods. Therein they are primal spirits (in the tradition of jinn or even titans) whom the gods must triumph over.

In Goëtia the old people are invoked to come to the sorcerer's aid, but the old people hid themselves from the world leaving very little magic power behind. Because of this, even learned men do not think they ever existed at all.

Hologrammic forum

I imagine it is a small amphitheatre with a device in the centre for projecting volumetric images from the speaker's mind. It is controlled by gesture and used to demonstrate principles and perform experiments in less expensive and time consuming fashion than using actual materials. However it has high fidelity only with simple processes; for complex experiments it provides proof of concept to draw funding or attention for costly endeavours.

The word hologrammic itself reminds me of grammar and the use of esoteric language for magical purposes. That led to the idea of the Tetragrammaton, the word of four letters, wherein each letter is a supreme concept. This ties into the idea emergent in all my settings (despite my efforts to the contrary), of the four great Numina, the properties of reality. They bind all the settings together in a sort of metacosmology.

Extending it further we come to hologrammatica, the whole cosmic language which wizards, gods and spirits know. Tying in Arthur Koestler's holon we get a power language whose individual parts (letters, phonemes, syllables, words) are objects of power '" perhaps even self-willed '" in their own right.

Sacred numbers... pictures in the blood

Numerology and extispicy respectively. Numerology is high magic, dependent on sacred patterns and mathematics. Extispicy is low magic, though in some ways a perverse imitation of numerology, as it depends on the patterns in organic bodies and deviations therefrom but requires bloodshed in order to make those patterns known. The best results are gained from human or even transhuman bodies, catapulting the discipline right into the territory of dark magic and beyond.

Carved like a woman or a bird

This is probably a statue of Setthsimha. The fact that you can't tell what manner of creature it depicts suggests that the queen is both. I certainly imagine her servant the lapitateru is birdlike. It is an incredibly ancient object used to invoke the represented creature. Setthsimha only heard the wizards' prayer because he called out to her while holding her image, though he did not realise what he was doing.

Grove of blood-soaked crysanthemums

The first hint you get that there might be something very, very wrong with the old people. Beauty and violence intertwined; the flower itself is associated by turns with death, nobility and happiness which makes it a very appropriate symbol. The lady is then filled with dark compassion. Not compassion. Dark compassion. I don't know what that means for sure, but you can be certain that when the fair folk are interested in you it is never, ever, ever a good thing.

Wicked lapitateru

That's a lower case L, not a capitalised I. There are probably many lapitateru, creatures of crowlike, skeletal aspect. When the lapitateru 'extended its fleshless claw' I was imagining it as literally being a creature of flensed and gory bone, but that isn't necessarily the case.

As the sun crept swiftly toward their feet

They say you shouldn't mention something in a story if it isn't important, so I guess this must be important. Creatures of secret and night, the old people probably hate the sun. If the old man had made his plea but a few moments later then the lapitateru, fearing the sun's power, might not have come before him. And things would have ended better for us all.

lands of gentle summer

This, like the euphemisms Fair Folk or Gentry, is probably far from accurate, or only accurate as a twisted, seductive half truth.

Mirthless moon

This, however, is spot on.

And never again was there peace in the later years of the world

Yup.

[ooc]Credit where credit is due, I probably owe Steerpike a boatload for the inspiration for that little tale. Check out Gossamer Isles (http://thecbg.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?78270.last) and all (http://www.thecbg.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?56772) his (http://www.thecbg.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?72556.post) other (http://thecbg.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?68868.post) awesome (http://www.thecbg.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?56490) shit (http://thecbg.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?58891.0). Now.[/ooc]

Dead bodies floated down the river for thirty days. Many came ashore and rotted in the shallows, and at first the people would drag them out and dry them and burn them. But the bodies did not stop coming, so the people gave up and only turned them over to see by their faces if they were men from their own village, and if not they would push them back out into the current and somewhere down the river another village would look at them and so on until they had come home or they passed out through the gates of Yamsle, where the haughty nobles looked disdainfully at the corpses that marched sodden through their homeland and beyond.

And the nobles would complain 'Look at how the king wastes them in his silly feuds when here at home our kingdom is unfinished. Our maiden city is only half dressed like a whore!' Then they would look out from their gardens at their golden city with its towers unshaped and skeletal and quaff their liquor and scowl. And all the while the dead went through the gates of Yamsle into the endless ocean and it seemed the ocean was like the fields of death themselves as they floated out north east and west, parting ways like a procession of weary pilgrims who have found their way into familiar lands and look now for their own beds.

The city which sits at the river's mouth as though on the edge of a high precipice into a dark and unventured place is called Pey. In that month of clinging clothes and mirthless tempers the cityfolk hid indoors forgetting work and burning incense like firewood to escape the stink of the river. There was one woman in that city who was a wizard of skill, but she was without repute, for in that place under the rule of the kings of Pey no woman could do magic. The witches of old were known as the consorts of the lecherous devils and had many children by them for the favours that would make them powerful.

But this woman was shrewd in her magic and cunning in her concealment, and she walked by the riverside among the soldiers' mothers who were the only ones who would brave the smell and look into the water for their sons. She too would look into the water, but she did not care for the faces of the dead, only the words that squirmed on their cold lips like worms and which no one else could see. She had a memory that swallowed everything, so that when she walked from the city's southern wall to the gates of Yamsle at the northernmost limits of Pey she read enough wisdom in the water to fill whole books, and she would hurry home on tired legs to her house in a muddy alley and write and write until morning, never sleeping.

If a guard or street vendor stopped her in her journey, asking 'Why do you walk by the river and the dead, oh matron?' she would say 'I am praying and mourning our nation's fallen sons and brothers.' And in this way she earned respect from the common people whose sons and brothers had been stolen away to a distant end. They called her a patriot and said 'Surely this one will be blessed by the gods, for she is pious and kind.'

So she made her journey every day of that month, memorising the words of the men in the river, and soon enough there were women following her who had lost all hope for their own children. They walked by the river moving as she moved with their heads turned down, peering like cranes at the gray faces, and when she would stop and stare intently, watching a body as if it were not a cadaver but a glorious diamond, the women would stop and follow her gaze, looking for truth or divinity in that terrible sight but finding only their own lingering misery.

Sometimes their daughters and the sons who had been too little to go out into the south and die would come to them and say 'Mama why do you still watch the soldiers? Our brother is not coming home to us.' The mothers would then reply 'We follow the lady of the river who prays for all your departed brothers, for she is wise.' And they knew not why that was true yet they knew that it was. They felt in their hearts that she was their own mother and that all the city was in her care, and when she reached the yawning gates the women would call after her as after a beloved sister, and she would raise her hand in the way that meant 'peace to you' but say nothing. And she would vanish into the maze of alleys that squatted beneath the towers of gold.

A very long time before these events which we now tell, a spirit of silver with fire wrapped around her feet came before the king of Pey, and there was a sound like a thousand furious elephants tramping and howling ,and the falling of mountains into the sea. The spirit leaned down to the king as his own mother had done in his earliest memory and the spirit said 'For the price of your mere human sight I will give you an army that none can conquer. Our city will grow great and whole again.' The foolish and fearful king fell down before her and took a crooked dagger in his hand and offered up his eyes and the spirit took them and smiled.

But in the later days the old blind king of Pey despaired, for he believed the wicked spirit had betrayed him. At night he would summon his advisors to him, and they would gather at the foot of his throne, kissing his feet one by one, and each one would say 'we stand ready to complete his majesty's desire.' And when their ritual was complete the king would say 'Tell me what news is there of the southern war. How close are we to peace or death?' And his servants would bow again and speak together: 'Our towns fall one by one and our army is ever smaller.' And the king would smile a rueful smile and say 'Then that is why the river does not smell as foul.'

Thus every night he would summon them and those things they would say. But in the final month when he called them to him, his servants said 'Every town is fallen and our army is all but dead.' And the king said nothing, but raised his nose like a hound and smelled the clean air. And he stood up and waved away the offered hands as stubborn old men do, and he limped to the balcony where a cool clean wind blew from the north carrying the scent of the ocean.

On the night of low talk, when we whisper among ourselves so that the gods cannot hear us share our private thoughts, the devils of the south reached the gates of the city of gold. Atop the walls of Pey a boy looked out and saw their green eyes gleaming in the dark and he cried out 'The devils are here! The devils are here and all is lost!' and the soldiers of the wall ran to the places where they would stand and die.

The devil king out in the field strode forward and rapped thrice on the great gate, and the gate opened, and the littlest prince of Pey went out to meet him in his father's ill-fitting helm and with his brother's unwieldy sword. The devil king laughed and said 'Where is my enemy, little thing? I mean to have his heart and brains for supper.' And the fearless little prince said 'the king of Pey is dead, oh lord of the south, but Pey will defy you regardless.' And he turned and strode away as the devil king laughed behind him calling out 'Long live the king!'

As the gates shut again the devils charged forward howling, while the soldiers of the wall rained down a storm of arrows and pitch. And the devils swallowed up the pitch like broth and snatched the arrows from their filthy fur and cast them back like javelins and the soldiers fell from the wall by the score and broke on the stones.

But somewhere in the maze of alleys the lady of the river finished her scribbling in the endless book of utterances. She hurried along the river to the broad gates of Yamsle and opened the book, and called out in a language that is not for the living to repeat, and the ocean answered her with mirthful tones. Out of the water and up the stairs that wind around the gates of Yamsle there marched all the dead sons of Pey, and they did not seem like the risen dead but rather like men who have been woken from the midst of a wonderful reverie.

They marched all the way to the walls of Pey where the last of the soldiers lay dead, and one among them threw open the gate as though parting a silken curtain. And he looked at the devil king and drew a sword that glowed with magnificent light, and as the conquerer flew at him he took off the devil's head with a single stroke. And the legion looked at this with disbelief and growing terror, and they turned on their feathered heels to flee. But the shining spears of the departed men caught the devils in their backs and the sons of Pey went about cutting off all the heads and putting them in chests of lead.

Then the risen prince of Pey looked at the sorcerer woman with eyes filled with understanding, and he said 'The things in your book and in your head are not for the living to know.' And she nodded at that, and the prince whirled his cape, and it was like a door opening into starry infinity. And she walked into it, and two by two the sons of Pey followed, until at last the departed prince stepped into that endless night and was gone.

The littlest prince of Pey watched all of this in tearful silence as the rising sun awoke in the west. The devils lying in the field before him smouldered and became like ash.



Death and dreams are the same. We distinguish them by the impermanence of the latter. With sufficient dreaming our souls may travel so far from waking that it as though we had died, and we go out into the lands of the psychopomps whose other mask is the oneiroi ,the kings of dreaming. We do not think, upon death, that our lives have ended, and in a manner they have not. The dream is only life by another logic and death is but dreaming without end. If we return somehow to life then it will be as though we had dreamed a distant dream and there will be little evidence of it in our hearts. This is how the kings of outer reality keep their secrets from foolish men, but the wizard knows these things and thence comes his power. One may find death from the roads of dream, and life through the hidden shapeless paths in the deathly realms, the paths that lead to the bridges of fantasy and into living hearts.

Wow, that was incredible...

*starts pounding table with fists*

more, more, more...

Haha. Glad to see I have a fan.

Thank you for the link

QuoteA very long time before these events which we now tell, a spirit of silver with fire wrapped around her feet came before the king of Pey, and there was a sound like a thousand furious elephants tramping and howling ,and the falling of mountains into the sea. The spirit leaned down to the king as his own mother had done in his earliest memory and the spirit said 'For the price of your mere human sight I will give you an army that none can conquer. Our city will grow great and whole again.' The foolish and fearful king fell down before her and took a crooked dagger in his hand and offered up his eyes and the spirit took them and smiled.

But in the later days the old blind king of Pey despaired, for he believed the wicked spirit had betrayed him. At night he would summon his advisors to him, and they would gather at the foot of his throne, kissing his feet one by one, and each one would say 'we stand ready to complete his majesty's desire.' And when their ritual was complete the king would say 'Tell me what news is there of the southern war. How close are we to peace or death?' And his servants would bow again and speak together: 'Our towns fall one by one and our army is ever smaller.' And the king would smile a rueful smile and say 'Then that is why the river does not smell as foul.'

Interesting Morality-tale/faustian-bargain take.

Thanks. I wanted to experiment with how a mythic/fairy-tale style rpg might translate to narrative. The story isn't terribly neat or cohesive but I think it has a sort of poetry that could be generated with the right system, much like the microlegends on my Verdigris thread.

I always like it when this thread gets bumped, because it's a good reminder for me to read it.

I almost typed "for me to eat it" just now; I think that in this particular case it's a relevant typo.

THE DIRE FOLK are black skinned like the long legged immortals of YELLOW EMPTINESS but it is an unseemly black as if from disease. They do not speak but only hum and chitter and sometimes wail like butchered dogs. HUER god of curses and denier of forgiveness is the father of that race.

THE OLDEST PEOPLE have a thin skin coloured like the dull dust of ages that is strewn over fleshless bones like an ill fitting cloth. They move not as men do '" by earthly spirit and natural force '" but as a leaf must move '" by some unseen breath or gesture of heaven. Thus the world cannot claim them and they laugh at its laws, but nor can they claim its shelter, and so the gluttonous kings and princesses of the abandoned roads kill and consume them wherever they can.

THE CHILDREN OF IY are in every kingdom of the world and every god of LESSER HEAVEN has an altar raised by some members of their race. They have covetous hearts and lustful dreams and eyes like glassy stones filled with fire. Once in the elder days MUNYIME the oracle went among the childlike gods and stole a glimpse of their future desires. When she came to the resting place of young IY she saw the dream of this endless race and all their iniquitous hungers. When she raised her dagger of green glass to end their evil before it could begin young IY woke as if by some premonition and fled the elder paradise into the wide shadowy lands of EARTH.

ABANDONED ROADS are the ancient paths which no god claims because they pass through profaned lands or bridge the span between collapsed temples. The most willful spirits make their kingdoms here, ruling over the children of IY and other races fallen or not-yet-risen.

THE TUMBLING EON is the age of IY's rule when his children were free and wild and gnawed greedily on the world. At the closing of that eon IY's impetuous sister clubbed him with the vast HAMMER OF TREES breaking open his great brain and shattering his will so that she could claim the next age as her own. If she had looked on as her blow fell she would have seen all that he had seen in the emptying pool of his eye. But she did not and so nothing would be learned from that age and her own EON is likewise filled with evils.

MERN'S BROW looms upon the crest of eager hill where the imish people make sacrifices of white lambs or golden tallowsnakes by the feet of the unknown ancestors (so named because their faces have been chipped away by gouls who mistook their semblance for true human shape), and where the masked and bloodpainted kunilga danced in the apolunar years. It has lost much of its lustre and its eastern mandible has collapsed under the weight of ages (and the adventurous games of children who climbed its half-hidden jawbone and wrestled and hid in the socket of its eye) but still it leers across the muddy crowds and the fountains of gethean square. At lowsun the dogs bark at its clawing shadow as though it were some predator from the bright days come to stalk among the early sleepers, and none remember that it is MERN the shade who has sat upon eager hill since the falling of serpents in the early eon.

CERSHOONDE was the fifth princess named in loengor's bellowing book; who the funegin with their pale athames woke in the ash garden by the kiss of maidensblood. Before her and greater in the esteem of ember court were KMEMY the consort of fivefold elder sky, and TIZDU, GUNKETRI and FYOH the three sidereal daughters, but all were slain by the spears of OB's algid army in the eon of long rust so that only she, the least, remained. With her contemptuous blessing the funegin raised up their priest to stand among the slaves of anemoi who yet lay dead in this frozen age and so, unchecked, he seized their guttering lantern and spilled its feeble fire across paya's mountain. The flame caught on the gate of the cities in the hollow and the pale subterrenes within thus suffocated. In punishment for her part in that holocaust the servants of limpid KETHTHIRHA cut out CERSHOONDE'S seed and her promise of generations and thus the sidereal line of embers is dead though the last princess yet lives.

ABBAL and WOTOLVOP are the two tribes of giants and they take their names from the wild cruel siblings who were eighth to sprout from the male-female shadow (and as the legends tell, were chased from the sweet lake of almonds by VOLP the carrion bird, whose children are forever the enemies of giants). Each tribe flies the ageless pelt of their founder from the top of their highest tower and from the lesser spires float the skins of successor kings and queens. The obgayu are the gaints' mongrel children and slaves to the great tribes. They are begat from the fragile seed of lesser races and in their thousands they haul the basalt cities of ABBAL and WOTOLVOP across the trackless lands and butcher the people of those lands while the giants croon and feast in the dark of their towers, roasting the bones of the conquered.

ROUS ILLALAT is the city that enfolds the shallow sea. It is built from charblack obelisks which savants of the colour mined in the ash fields of ruined MONS. VUPTA the royal naïf of tears lives in the cradle gardens of the city's north among the scarred and gem studded knight-pathics. There he is safe from jealous TIRSER, the city's lord and his brother, whose body becomes like pillared salt in the light of ULONG, and who would consume VUPTA as a hawk does a rat. DATDAIA is the enemy of ILLALAT, and sprawls across the shallow sea with long towers of hollow reeds that hum and sigh in the wind. Its people are the yish, native to the lands of caterpillar and loyal to the NAVARCH though they have the dark blood of IY. The lady O is their ruler, and like every sorceress of yish can possess the bodies of the gigantic serpents that snatch carracks in their jaws. She would throw off the yoke of ILLALAT but for the memory of dead thalassos and the evils of MONS.

Very cool - this has a very primordial, mythic feel to it.  Who are the knight-pathics?

Not entirely sure, but when I think of them I have this image of unhuman self-mutilating catamite templars.

BIRTHSONGS
These songs, which together comprise the greater birthsong of the sunken city, have a common origin in the anglelands but not a common author. The original collection was composed in short stanzas and sung in the comparatively unstructured style common to the folktales of the sunken states. As it is impossible to capture the beauty of that strange verse without performing it aloud and untranslated we have provided a prose translation which (we hope) approximates its original demeanour. Many of the songs are missing, or have been stolen from History.

A child once sat down to play by the seat of the wizard lord of adders, whose stony aspect had gone untended by the keepers of the city garden and so was hidden by the growth of years. It had not been the child's intention to court the wizard's favour, for one so young could not know the ways of the secret seekers, but by playing as she did and clambering over his gown she woke him as surely as if she had laid her prayers before him.  The adder lord's square face came to life and he asked her what blessing she might have from him. The child replied in the language of children which is unknown to us: 'I would have mud on my dress and leaves in my hair.' The stone sage, understanding those words as we who are grown old and foolish cannot, smiled and made the sign of sacred scales upon her brow. Thus the little one came early to the secrets of the strange design.

The missing stanzas describe the further adventures of the child of adders, but their pages are damaged beyond usefulness. We join the child again at the climax of the tale of the tower and her adventure continues parallel to the fox-hooded wizard and the brown jucal.

Every night a man crawled across the city rooftops. He had a brown mask-and-hood that looked like a fox or a horned snake and his clothing was pinned with feathers. Some who saw him thought he was a ghoul out to steal their spirits and they threw stones or flung ordure at him. Others who thought him one of the elder kind only shut their doors with a warding sign or cursed that name which compels all chthonic creatures. The hooded man, who was neither ghoul nor earthen fiend, only smiled at their invectives. He shook his head and waved his arms at them in mockery and crawled onward like the shadow of a creeping lizard. He blew like smoke between the shutters of closed windows and slithered beneath locked doors like oil. When morning came the witnesses of his trespass would approach the householders and say: 'A shade crept in your home last night. Surely it meant some evil.' But the householders would be vexed at this and remark that their sleep had been untroubled '" what's more the sun seemed especially warm and bright for such brief winter days. Each night for many years the hooded man entered a different house and its occupants emerged to similar tales, which they met with comparable confusion.

In that city there is a certain broad tower with a top of light-spun glass. In that tower once lived the yellow-caped wizards who trade their parts among themselves and bargained new organs from the collector machines so that no piece of them could be called their own and in so doing learned the histories of this or that particular human part. It was often said of those sybarites that their components were stolen from the poor, or the mad, or the blind vagrant children who sing the evening songs and serve the sordid fancies of the rich. This was not true of the wizards of the broad tower, and yet they were not creatures of kindness. They jealously hid their science from the plaguewashers who would beg their kindness when a fearsome malady spread through the city. They closed their hearts to the pleas of surgeons when the dismembered peasant sons returned from battles in the high country. The people of the city soon grew to hate the wizards of the glass-topped tower and when such a magus travelled through the streets in her palanquin, riding the shoulders of gray slaves, there was always someone in the motley crowd ready to work some mischief against her.

One night, an adept of that detested place travelled along the hysteron course toward the lone citadel on the city's far side where, it was well known, the grovelling castellan would sell living hostages from the highland war to any who could pay. The gangsters who police the night-time streets saw her path and among them was the brown jucal, who spoke thus to his friends: 'Long have we wondered at the secrets of those yellow-caped villains. I shall fake my way among them and learn their evils.' He hurried to the citadel along the routes known to criminals and assassins, and entered it by the high black windows that face the rising sea. Down he went through lamp-lit halls to where the prisoners of war are kept and stealthily contrived to imitate their kind, weeping and cursing the sunken city and scouring himself with dirt. At length the jailor arrived with the wizard by his side, and he seized the brown jucal and thrust him into a coffin of stone which the wizards' grey slaves conveyed, by the sorcery of their own degraded race, into the chambers of the tower.

Here the tale is interrupted and, in the tradition of the anglelands, another speaker with another tale begins, after which the former song is resumed.

Skills
There are six mortal levels of ability but only four mortal levels of skill. An unskilled character is considered Naive in the area concerned. Such a proficiency has a value of zero. Each level above Naive costs an Exploit equal to its value and each exploit must be gained in sequence. Therefore an amateur flautist who seeks renown for his talents must complete a value 2 exploit in order to become learned followed by a value 3 exploit in order to become adept.

Exploits
These are the focus of a given legend. An exploit is a driving narrative culminating in the acquisition of some new wisdom.

Amateur: A year of studious application.
Learned: A major commitment of effort and resources over half a decade.
Adept: A gruelling and confronting undertaking of many years.
Masterful: A quest of staggering effort, requiring decades and leaving you irrevocably changed.
Enlightened: A task consuming whole lifetimes.

The Hidden and Forgotten Arts
Some arts are baffling to modern minds and therefore require a significantly greater effort from the student in order to attain even the most base proficiency.

Hidden arts (including many lesser magics and some past, future or esoteric sciences) require exploits one level higher than normal (so that, for example, a learned Wizard of Adders must effectively undertake a masterful exploit to become adept).

Forgotten arts are utterly alien to the current age, having been swallowed up by history or existing in some inconceivable future state. These require exploits two levels higher than normal.

Example: Indigo Jittelraya the cavalier
inept Romancer
adept Swordsman
learned Rider of the Bronze Moth
amateur Drummer; Singer; Orator; and Savant of the Crooked Rod

Looks like a good system, and a nice alternative to "leveling up."  Was the sequence of ranks designed with FUDGE in mind?

I love the stanzas, too - all very tantalizing.  Collector machines and grey slaves... creepy (are the grey slaves spirits, or reanimated corpses, or som ething quite different??).

[ooc]Steerpike: The system was based on Fudge but not designed for it. It's actually a diceless system reinventing the FATE system I'd already concocted (http://thecbg.org/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?76710.0#post_76811) (but left unfinished), and intended for the same metaverse.

Collector machines... I don't know. The grey slaves are from a past age, reborn. They possess strange magics of their own age which their masters, though they be wise, cannot understand.[/ooc]
Every living thing is bound to every other living thing, by generations stretching back into timeless protean space.  They are each a child of the first amoebic eve, indeed, a splintered reflection of the firstborn's own self, an unbroken chain of life and being '" one life, one being, with a trillion faces.  So too are worlds, all worlds, daughters of the first world in uninterrupted sequence: the same living planet divided and rebirthed.  A study of their genesis reveals the path to the parent and the ancestor: the first world whence all others, even ours, are spawned.

It is not, as some have speculated, a mere quirk of uncertainty in the physical nature of the cosmos '" no reconciliation of contrary possibilities or a need to account for all variables '" that demands new worlds be born.  If so, there would be no counting their number and no nuance too subtle by which they might be differentiated.  Rather, much like living animals there are moments of fertility, when a planet overburdened with histories or ideas or thronging organisms, must discharge the excess, budding new spaces to accommodate that which it has no place for.  And so the nascent planets blossom, and the parent, divested of old weights, is itself a new creature.  It forgets.  Those who call it home will most often forget.  And the new worlds have no past to remember. '"J.Titus

ANTEBELLUM: The past belongs to another place.  It lingers here only as a glimmer seldom glimpsed: a phantom of regret and unshakeable fears that once refused the possibility of paradise.  So we do not know what caused the War, or what the world was like before it.  If you like, the War itself was the birth of Quoth; to speak of a 'before' is to speak of impossibilities. '"Poiñee

ARMAGEDDON AND AFTER: Queen Shybbel and the Waking Bubble; Vi, Ferd and Tingwe, the Duchesses of Infinity; CROMLIER the father-mountain and all the tiny Gods of Morning... by war's end these gods were dead, their kingdoms crushed by mighty BLUE SKY, questing Long Nan Muto and the evil Ragamattia, scoured away with fire and cannon and little marching horrors.

But not forgotten.

Jangwa, King of Spite, who is slave to Ragamattia, chased the ghost of Wanohano, the smallest of all gods, through the streets of Pars, even as its towers toppled and burned.  'I will not be silenced!' the little one shouted, 'We will be remembered!'  And though bitter Jangwa is tireless, Wanohano was quick, leavened as all things are when the flesh is cut away, and the Black King could not catch her.

From the ashes of the world, muddied brown with the blood of empires, came the forests of Qetiphot, and Qetiphot bade the great trees strike the ruins that remained, and the creeping vines to choke and split the towers that gaped and screamed at the sun.  By the will of Sputhain, First King of Earth, the mountains opened wide their mouths and swallowed up the gory rivers and charnel fields.   Huah-Huah! who writes the story of the world compelled the winds and the rains: 'Forget!'  But they would not.  Not air or water defamed the face of shattered Pars or humbled empty Manayan.

The shame of the gods was not hidden, and not forgotten. '"R.D.Gustaeo

...OF GREEN PEOPLE: Qetiphot, emboldened by the spread of her woods, made a race of her own: the Green People with cities of leaves.  Being of the wood, they had no hearts, and less kindness in them even than Ragamattia.  The whole world hated them, and they learned in time to hate themselves.  They took the sword Flame from Cassipode as she slept and even as it consumed them they sought the head of their mother.  She scattered them with a shrug, of course, and tore their lords apart to feed her soil, but her pride was humbled.  The Green People live now in the cool dark beneath a few traitor forests and scheme forever new ways to spite their mother.

SHADDAI RISES, FALLS: In the early days there was an empress named Wesser.  Once proud and ruthless, her wits were denuded by age and warped with paranoia.  Her daughters and sons gathered to plot her demise and agreed that young Shaddai, an imperial grandson who was handsome yet simple and easily led, would succeed her.  But when Wesser sat at banquet, ready to drink from the bowl her children had poisoned, a gale blew in by the will of Long Nan Muto who had loved the empress before her madness, and it carried the news of their treachery.  Discovered, bold princess Jimoid cast away caution and leapt at her mother with a knife, but the winds had already carried Wesser away.  

There was a long war in which Jimoid and many others died.  But Shaddai lived and by war's end he was sixteen, and a man.  Cynicism had fouled his native gentility; tragedy had worn away his trust.  Still beautiful, lords and spirits alike gave their daughters to him so that he might have a wife from every kingdom.  He made slaves of them all and married none, for he thought he would live forever and saw no need for heirs.  Nevertheless, at the end of his life he did take a wife, and sire an heir, for the gods had not yielded their secrets to him.

This second Shaddai was crueller still.  He gave in kind with all gifts received: was loved by the wealthy and despised by paupers, who had nothing to give and so were starved or put away in unlit mazes and sent mad.  When a king seeking favour gave Shaddai the best of his horses, a pearl-white charger with hooves of gold, and the beast shat loudly as the emperor moved to mount it, Shaddai sent him all the sick and deranged of the empire, thus infecting his subjects and making a leper of his realm.

The third Shaddai was as unlike his forebears as can be imagined.  Gracious and even-handed, he knew in his youth that he must one day kill his father, but could not think how to accomplish it, for his father had become a sorcerer.  At last he heard tales of Flame, stolen from sleeping Cassipode and guarded by the Green People, and set out to find them.  Because they have no hearts, the Green People did not tell him of its curse; they thrust it gladly into his hands and hurried back into their burrows.

The world itself rejoiced when Shaddai put the sword Flame through his father's neck and burned him to ash.  But many lords had profited from the emperor's ways and they knew the son would prove their ruin.  Young Shaddai was murdered in his bed, never having worn the crown. '"Anonymous

AGELESS WHITE CASTLES: Centuries thence, when the name Shaddai had long since been forgotten, a human man otherwise of no importance found a magic unknown to the Living Gods that could make stone immortal.  He was murdered by his closest friend as soon as he shared this discovery.  That traitor became a king and made a castle which could not be sundered, then passed the secret to his children who became kings and queens of other places.

One day, much later, when their kingdoms covered half the world and were set pointlessly against one another '" their walls could not be broken and even gods were kept out '" Ragamattia said to Jangwa 'There is one Queen, and she is Ragamattia.'  So Jangwa crept to a tiny castle window and whispered poisonous words that filled the people's hearts with hate, so that they set upon one another and soon the halls were silent.  To each castle he crept, until all were dead amid the immortal stone.  But the castles remained, undaunted, filled with ghosts. '"Apocrypha

PARS FALLS, RISES: For ten thousand years dark-eyed Xont ruled the city of Pars.  A million invisible chains descended from his palace of air and clung to the people below so that he could shepherd their minds with sensuality and suggestion.  Because of this, the people were happy, but stupid.  Then Fabool the Demon came, fleeing the justice of another world.  He fell through the sky and broke the beautiful palace of Xont.  The illusion crumbled.  The citizens despaired of their true surroundings, warred against their god and almost killed him.  But Xont is the dream of ecstasy and thus unkillable.  He slunk away into memory and nursed his wounds.

Fabool ruled, then.  As a Demon from the stars his very being was poison, so the city, already a ruin, decayed and putrefied.  Though inhuman, Fabool was mortal.  He was strangled on his throne after a century of degenerate rule, and it again sat empty. '"C.N

THE QUEENS OF PARS: Twenty-two queens held the throne of Pars between the fall of Fabool and the rise of CROMLIER.  Pim the Eater of Hearts died peacefully in her sleep; Ley-or-Ley? who may have been two queens at once, was struck dead by the wrathful Langoor; Narn was crushed by her own weight; Sarmonise was burned alive in her bridal chamber; Hama was strangled by her impatient successor; Mamodel was flogged to death for Matricide; Dimardenda died in childbirth; Nosemardenda died of old age; Nimgua was eaten by trolls; Bamuncephelin abdicated and was not seen again; Rangal Puji drowned under suspicious circumstances; Tingal Puji died of the pox, as did all her daughters; Ursull Pan Orsid was slain by a hundred arrows at the battle of Pann; Vertimine died of an infected wound; Xarpir died of a broken heart; Fulminid Crassea fell from a great height; Sessil was poisoned by traitors; Bwaroji was poisoned by accident; Padmose poisoned herself; Onee was crushed by Mons the Tower; Lamili was murdered by her lover; Fumili went mad and cut her own throat... The gods have a rotten sense of humour. '"M.P

MOON AND THE VIRGIN: The goddess MOON looked down from her gardens one day and saw the boy Dimiu resting naked in a field.  Smitten, she went to his parents and begged that she be permitted to have him, but was denied.  She slew them, and when Dimiu returned home to find his parents dead he thought they had been killed by some monster.  He lived alone for a time, fearful of the beast that had taken his parents, while MOON watched him in yearning and shame.

At last he left with his mother's mattock and his father's knife, and journeyed long until he reached ancient Pars, where war was brewing.  There he became a soldier and saw the summoning of Mons the Tower, who had lain dead beneath the streets since before Time began, and fought the endless armies of Black Jangwa.  All the while, MOON watched him and defended him, and came to him in dreams.  For this reason alone he survived, became a general, and even once turned back the King of Spite.

Then MOON approached him undisguised and offered him a kingdom above all the kingdoms of earth, but though she was more beautiful than any creature of this world, his heart belonged to the soldier Qalil, who had fought beside him for so long.  That night Dimiu lay with Qalil, and MOON, seeing this, left him at last, in sorrow.  Her blessings left him also, but Dimiu, not knowing why, felt it was a burden lifting free after so many years, a burden he had not known was there. '"a fable

Those are ancient things, of which there is much more besides.  We could speak of the ire of Ragamattia, of her death and her resurrection; of CROMLIER's return or how arrogant BLUE SKY was thwarted; how Jangwa stood alone against all the other gods and lived; how humankind learned flight, and how to raise the dead, and how to speak with stars...

But all this is a long, long time ago, on a world you've never heard of.  Better, then, to speak of now.

[ooc]Oh yeah, and that thing there is a repost of material from another thread. I'm integrating all my thematically related junk into one... thingy.[/ooc]

Skills
Each skill is fairly comprehensive; specialisation and personalisation arises naturally as a consequence of the specific schooling you received during your exploits (such as a Prowler being schooled in the canticles of misdirection as opposed to the four adroit motions), and indicates advantages and unusual abilities.

[ooc]Very much an incomplete list. More later.[/ooc]

One day the sun will forgive the world. It will spread the light of its love across all the dried up and lonely lands.

The girl is not sure that she believes this. She imagines the sun growing darker, ever darker, until it is swallowed up by the shadowy sky. Is there a colour farther and lonelier than black? Are there unfamiliar colours on the other side of our darkening heaven?

She asks her father if this is possible. He does not know such things, and wisely tells her so.

DAY TIME
They could not see the stars because the days were bright. There are still machines that order the hours by the sun's motions. They have no present use.

TWILIGHT
They anticipated its fading by many centuries. There were no revolutions. They stored its lingering light in submerged cities. The forests overcame their ancient need and were filled with a hundred colours. Strange new fires blossomed in the gardens of the world.

NIGHT TIME
They know that soon they will be swallowed up or they will be delivered. They have been joined by others, for whom the darkness is not so.

I really like the way you represented the skills.

But where did "Tjibarubhera" come from. I did a google search and all I found was this thread. Amusing that no one in any language has previously used that particular collision of words.

Quote from: Light DragonI really like the way you represented the skills.

Thanks. I want to eliminate the divide between skill mechanics and skills as an expression of the character and setting. There are very few numbers in this system.

Miscellany #1
...Eerie, prince of Frostplane, learnt of Dismal King's infidelity. With five and twenty coins he bought foul MAGGNET's service in revenge, and so MAGGNET followed Dismal King as he was coming home from his lover's keep, and MAGGNET stove in that infidel's brain. Some time later CARAC-MOST-PLENTIFUL was travelling among those very same stones and he came upon Dismal King's rotted body. The body spoke to CARAC-MOST-PLENTIFUL: you are the lord of birth, and oft have you traded life with life for a worthy bargain. And the body of Dismal King whispered a worthy bargain to CAR-MOST-PLENTIFUL, who put a tiny seed into the softness of Dismal King's slurrying brain. From that seed grows GWOLOR, the first of all trees.

Later came Frittic Bomli, huddled in manpelts against the horrid forest winter and hurrying along that same forgotten path. ZOAM THE STOAT now dwelled in that dark realm, and seeing Frittic Bomli pass by he grew mad with violent hunger. He leapt out before her and she knew what he was about. She sang out to GWOLOR, the first of all trees: Father of Life, rescue this one whose life is about to be destroyed. But GWOLOR sneered at Frittic Bomli: from such deaths as yours there is often a life; the green king does not recognise you. So ZOAM THE STOAT had all of Frittic Bomli, but later a quiet green hate was born in the warmth of her and it crawled like a withering snake along the hearth of the first forest until it found arrogant GWOLOR and slowly over many epochs it has wound around his long belly, and one day it will choke out his life.

I like it when nature spirits are capricious/indifferent/cruel rather than being all Gaian and gentle and motherly and crap.  "Red in tooth and claw" > Eywa!

Quote from: SteerpikeI like it when nature spirits are capricious/indifferent/cruel rather than being all Gaian and gentle and motherly and crap.  "Red in tooth and claw" > Eywa!

I also like when spirits get their comeuppance for their actions as opposed to being unstoppable and unpunishable entities of infinite wisdom.

I like stories where past events come back around and bite someone.

images
She tired of the darkness... which lay in seething film upon the mirror of the world and so was a reflection of Her own form.

She conceived of colour, and conceived COLOUR, and that child divided into its dozen hues and lay upon the mirror of the world, giving definition to her face.

It gazed at her with her own face, and she had not considered the principle of shape, so that she saw a shapeless thing, and it saw a Shapeless Woman.

That is how they knew one another, in disgust and without comprehension.

ages
First-man and First-woman began as one being. COLOUR peered into that creation and saw the radiance and reason of its shape and said 'this one is like me'.

Shapeless Woman looked beyond the lie of light to the hollow at its core: 'no, said she, it is like me'.

They divided First-man from First-woman, but when they searched the soul of their newly severed creation they could not separate its definition and its darkness.

First-man lived within First-woman, and she lived in him. When Shapeless Woman vanished them each to a distant corner of the world they found each other unerringly.

images
Shapeless Woman had many elder children, born not from COLOUR's love but their mother's solitary congress in the limitless night.

Uncertainly they are called Morning and messenger, and Hollowness and The Unrelenting, and they hold many more within themselves whose names are surer but less worthy.

THE CHERISHED ONES are the spears and shields that Bone-thief armed his eleven soldiers with when Unraveller's armies set upon the gate at Brother Mountain. Noble as their stand was, the godless princess could not be repelled by any human force, and so those soldiers were butchered. Because the mountain gods do not honour good intentions they spurned Bone-thief's labour and his memory. He is not remembered in the high countries. Only these cherished instruments remain, and the warriors who use them do not know why they are so beloved. Bone-thief himself is blind. He has never in all his many lives held any killing thing and he claims he never shall.

KOVOLK HELLTHINGS are gauntlets of chitin claws and tiny iron gears. Chains depend from their fingers like the tails of dead scorpions that can be lengthened and whipped about or loosed entirely upon an advancing crowd to seize or to rend with many barbs.

THE UNGLORIOUS are glaives of solid iron. They were first possessed by the Yellow Farekhas, greatest among the samkha, but they were abandoned when the forge-born horde retreated to Fulminant Plain. Like all the blades of that race they hold their edge and lightness only when filled with heat. Thus they are wielded instead as massive crushing clubs by the grandswordsmen of Millipede.

SOMNOLENT SPEARS are carved out of living dream. Their broad spades sever the bonds between the wakeful and their dreaming selves. They are put into the hands of slumbering soldiers, who spring up to battle their foes with half-lidded eyes.

THE THREE MAJESTIES are machines of incomparable size, designed by Humlutt the Architect for the siege of Tcharauk. Each bears the countenance of one of the Middle Gods: Grievance, Avarice and Restitution are represented, perhaps because their aspects best embodied the principles of that legendary war, but Charity and Abnegation were rejected. The priests of that slighted pair claim their rejection as the reason for the siege's failure.