The Campaign Builder's Guild

[ooc]Here's another setting kernel. All the player characters will be wives and concubines of a dying emperor, or of his sons.[/ooc]

THE SUBLIME EMPEROR AGSWEM CHOSOURTH II
...and all his elder sons have fallen in battle; deceived by the demoness Jossimberhethic, whom they summoned. His body writhes in slow liquefaction on the imperial bed, while his phantom slinks, ordurous and peripatetic, through these severe and emptied chambers where we wait out the long days until his body's self-destruction. ITEMS: the liminal spear, alacrity; the luminal diadem, severity; the supinal hound, autperga

SPLINTERED COCCELOMBE
...sits beside the doors to the privy chamber, which she has guarded through unnumbered dynasties with gene-bound impartiality. She cannot be persuaded to any alliance; nor can she be compelled, by martial arts or magics, to desert her post, or to surrender that flute which coaxes painted monsters from the palace walls to devour assassins and petitioners both.

IDSWEM & ORDSWEM & VORSIMMI & IUTSWALE & LOPEC & CHOSTER & AGVOSTER & WEIC
...and their armies, all sworn eternally to Agswem, their immortal father, were consumed by amberlight on the shores of Thridd; or were vivisected by Sikolume's centimanni; or were immured in the compressed labyrinths of the Intellector. With them we lost that convoluted but unambiguous line of primogeniture, in whose absence all the imperial mothers and their bastards and their bastards' wives connive toward accession.

[ooc]It has been very quiet here - who will even read this? Well, I can't help my self, CBG, I love you  :cry:[/ooc]

So this is you, and your actual daughter? I mean, congrats, man, but, at the same time... damn.

Thanks for sharing it with us.

Writing, writing, writing, always writing... and sometimes getting paid for it.

I''m deep into my novel based on my setting kernel "Last Song Of A Dragonnish Piper". It's somewhat inspired by "The Glass Bead Game", except that stuff happens in it.

Also watching the CBG from the shadows like a creepy little nerdpervert.

[ooc]This is the sequel to AMONG THESE DARK SATANIC MILLS. It is set eleven years later.[/ooc]





PLEURALITY
"...deathlessness had corroded all their virtues. In order that they might put an end to that immortal nation's debaucheries, the Extradimensionals who had exalted them enjoined the men and and women to separate from one another, and from their mortal neighbours, and to establish two isolated gendered dominions. After some thousands of years, those peoples were so changed by their own alchemy that you could not tell that they had ever been human beings at all. Their shapes and their magics were so disquieting that no human nation of that world or any other would consort with them, so those immortal men and women fashioned, from their own blood, mortal emissaries that would not terrify humanity. The emissaries thought themselves more akin to humankind (whom they but superficially resembled) than to their own grotesque parents, and they would not return home when their tasks were done. In time they betrayed every secret of those hermetic immortals."

EPOCALYPSE
"The prodigals did not understand all the knowledge that they shared with humanity, and they could not differentiate between the true gods of reality and their inchoate predecessors. When the immortal women and men realised that the mortal nations were ignorantly committed to the summoning of the Old Glass Gods, they resolved to destroy them before the rituals could be accomplished. They seeded all the worlds of that system with poisons, but human sciences had advanced since the separation of those races, and the mortal nations entombed themselves far beneath the earth to sleep the long ages until some prophesied time when their gods might be properly born into the cosmos."


Jigrim: When Albion first fell, the most devout of humankind refused to join their kin in the hibernation tombs at the base of the world and were slain by the Immortals' incredible curses, but those sleepless priests were so desperate to realise their god's advent that they persisted beyond the extinction of their flesh. Mess, Shell, Washer, Gyre and Trillion delved into the submerged arcology where one such enclave of committed souls had met their end, and there the phantom Jigrim found them, and began his ritual.

Virginia "Mess" Greyholt: The mother of the fragment godling Oedtyrdy, made pregnant by an inconceivably ancient spectre. She and her friends first attempted to exorcise the swiftly gestating infant, and when that failed they sought a way to prevent the waking of the people beneath the earth and the return of their old barbarities. Now the Reawakened are challenging Forbance and the uplanders for dominion on this grey continent, and Oedtyrdy is in their possession, and all the old sorceries of that degenerate race are flooding back into the world.

Eoin "Corky" Green: One of the frontier's most accomplished orthodox sorcerers. He learned from the mad priestess Mother Lark how to travel between dimensions, but so far he has only accessed the terrifying possible futures of his own contested planet.

Berthold "Trillion" Wing: The son of the brutal chieftain Red James, and one of the delinquents that discovered Jigrim and the sleepless priests. He was resurrected by Vloam the Dissenter, to aid in that renegade's fight against the other priests and forestall their acquisition of Oedtyrdy.

Mother Bee: A young priestess from Forbance. She has travelled to the frontier to minister to the Reawakened and prevent the dissemination of heretic sorceries.

Oedtyrdy: The daughter of Mess and the phantom Jigrim. According to Prolocutor Geoffrey, she is a fragment of Ort, the Old Glass God of Collisions. She projects her likeness into the dreams of the uplanders, who believe her to be, by turns, a demoness, and Christ returned.

Fabtamweoe: One of the prodigals who gave the secrets of true worship and of the Old Glass Gods to the original humans of Albion. She has consumed the unawakened bodies of the other prodigals, has assumed a role of spiritual leadership among the Reawakened, and has taken the preadolescent "god" Oedtyrdy as her charge. If she has realised the true implications of Oedtyrdy's ascension, it does not seem to have given her pause.

Imperfect Duplicate: One of five extradimensionals remaining in this system. He and his siblings were stirred from their long sleep by Oedtyrdy's natal cries. They, alongside the Immortals, are the uplanders' allies in their contest against the Reawakeed, but they can exist in realspace only briefly.

Chacssu: A gladiator in the cartilage gardens of Aungw a billion years ago, and now leader of the marauders that plague Forbance's frontier clans. His tunic is pinned with a dozen uplanders' tongues, like medals, and he wades into battle with a monstrous executioner's sword that is as long as he is tall (and he, like all the Reawakened, is very tall indeed).

Ndgamre: The only one of Fabtamweoe's many lovers to have awakened. He believes that the uplanders should be invited to join the Reawakened in their efforts to unite Oedtyrdy with the "Godhead", and has persuaded many of his peers to take a similarly diplomatic course (Chacssu and his marauders are an obvious and significant exception). He has shared some of Albion's original sorceries with the uplanders as a gesture of goodwill.

The Immortals: Angular confusions of glistening pink tissue and gesticulating bone. Their cities were hidden behind a space-contorting curtain that prevented egress and observation from either side, so they were blind to the events unfolding on Albion until Imperfect Duplicate led Mess, Shell, Washer, Gyre and Trillion through the Valley of Separations.

Conversely, I found something major to disagree with in every paragraph of that post but the second; so when I say that it is totally, utterly unnecessary, I mean that as someone who is neither white, nor healthy, nor middle class, nor "born in alignment with our new, great America", that post did nothing whatsoever for me. I speak only for myself, and to the extent that I may speak for myself, the sentiment completely misses the mark.

Flower of Creation discovered the Perfected Path after meditating for many eternities, and she willed her own extinction so that her carcass could become the seedbed of the universe. The spectres called Illumination, Delimitation and Arrogation emerged from that corpse and resolved into the axes of cosmic understanding, according to whose geometry all spiritual effort is defined.

Dimensionless People were once human, and they have transcended humanity, and perhaps they shall become human in some other epoch. Because there is no space beyond the universe, they all share a communal self, whose organisation is not comprehensible, and because there is no time beyond the universe, there is likewise no sequence to their rising from and falling into and rising again out of reality. Every Thing Under Heaven and Million Gates and Rivers separated themselves from the Dimensionless People, and gained shape and sexuality, and entered the universe to make love and sire offspring and master all conceivable arts. Several of their siblings followed enviously after them, or perhaps preempted them, but these people had no schemes of their own and no motives beside jealousy, and so could not persist in the universe except by the theft of that splendid couple's labour.

Sobre Judgment manifests from the disquiet within the Dimensionless People's manifold self, so that they can resolve their disputes with dispassion. I do not know what subjects perturb their infinite and unreal mind, nor what properties of consciousness Sobre Judgment is denied so that he is not similarly distracted.

Commmutation is the boundary that divides the Nothing Beyond The Universe from the domains that stand in relation to nothing as nothing does to reality. Being thus positioned, he is both not-real and not-not real, a condition which I do not understand well enough to explain. Commutation was the mentor of Flower of Creation, and it may be that he gained his wisdom from some predecessor, or that he came on his own to inspiration, or that the Perfected Path is, like its possessors, a self-willed being of unreality, and therefore sourceless.

Well, as a black, bisexual, essentially disabled and probably unemployable young man from Georgia, I'll just be gracious and say "I appreciate the sentiment, but it's totally, utterly unnecessary".

And leave it at that. Because a forum post like the one above is a huge pandora's box of controversy, and the last time I tried (rather incompetently) advocating my contrarian and rather illiberal positions on this board it was a complete disaster. (Remember that, anyone? What a circus!)

Thanks for the link, G

D Vincent Baker's The Seclusium of Orphone is pretty sexy. I can't really recommend his games' mechanics, but I can always count on his prose and his imagination.

Geez Louise!

Quote from: SteerpikeOne of the things I love about the implied early modern European setting of LotFP is that if you do end up unleashing a horrifying apocalypse of some kind, it feels less like destroying something beautiful you created, like a carefully cultivated homebrew world. It's kind of fun to just wreck 17th century England

That makes sense. Though there's something to be said for aiming some existential threat at a campaign setting that the players have invested countless hours in, and challenging them to avert it. Them's some high stakes (Our group doesn't adventure in Jade Stage anymore, or in Cadaverous Earth, or in Dystopia, because they didn't stop me from wrecking the world. THEY WERE WEAK)

Shit I should have been playing this for years.

[ooc]SUPER PUMPED!

Now that my health is improving, this "self portrait" is literally the first thing I've sketched in well over a year. I shouldn't expect this to mean anything to anybody here, but not being able to express myself artistically has been driving me fucking NUTS (more nuts than the actual hallucinations).


[/ooc]

My gaming group's answer has long been that metallic dragons do rule the world.

Since all true dragons "can metabolize even inorganic material", and metallics seem to be vegetarian or piscetarian  (when they aren't eating pearls of gemstones or morning dew), when it says that "Red dragons are meat eaters by preference, and their favorite food is a human or elven youth," it means that Reds (the smartest chromatics) really are CONGENITALLY TERRIBLE PEOPLE; they can't help themselves, always self-sabotaging, pissing off everybody around them with their bad decisions, generally being assholes.

By contrast: "A gold dragon often assumes human or animal guise"; "Silver dragons seem to prefer human form to their own, and they often have mortal companions, even forming deep friendships"; and "Bronze dragons are inquisitive and enjoy polymorphing into small, friendly animals to observe adventurers. They are fascinated by warfare, eagerly joining an army for a just cause—and good pay". A metallic dragon is a total mensch, prizing humanoids' self-determination so highly she doesn't solve their problems for them, even though she can, and even when she does she makes it look like a humanoid did it, so that the lesser races don't become dependent. It's also worth noting that Golds and Silvers are the smartest of all core dragons, while bronze dragons are as smart as Reds. The bad dragons don't realise it, but everybody's laughing about them behind their backs.

EDIT: also, wandering far from DnD canon as I understand it: dragons have huge hoards not merely because they like the look of glittering gold, trinkets and baubles, but because they understand material value and how to leverage it. Their hoards are both the shiny beds they sleep on, and the secrets they keep concealed beneath them (or keep locked away in their ancient memories). Bronze, Gold and Silver dragons are, more than anything else, masters of secrets, and they make better use of such leverage than other dragons because they are smarter AND more disciplined.

BASTARDS. UN-LIVES MATTER.