The Campaign Builder's Guild

And the one we need? Man, that means Nom is like Batman, only better...

Nom is definitely better than batman.

That would explain his Facebook photo.

STAMP COLLOQUY - The city and... home? Carnival says that's what Feely called it, when they were alone together in the gallery doing Mamma-knows-what awful things to eachother. But you only ever heard Feely spit gibberish, high up in his nest, tangled in scavenged cables and subsumed by amber traffick light. You can't ask him now because he's moulted. He doesn't say anything anymore. Surely it doesn't feel like home to you: home was down in the metro with Mamma, and Mamma is dead.

GLAMER JUNCTION - Where you and your thousand siblings gathered, pressed wetly hotly crushingly close and deafened by your collective confusion. Sister Carnival did not soften the message, which was as harsh as she was hideous (her new face near fully exposed, pink, glistening and sardonic; the old one luridly half hanging and dripping red on the makeshift dais). What will you do now that Mamma is gone? There will be no more siblings and no milk for the larvas that remain. What will happen to the city? Who will be left to wait the coming of Sweet Anodyne?

BLOOM - A sudden efflorescence along Dime Street destroyed Saint Berry's Cathedral, killing That'll Learn You and his tiny congregation. Carnival says they have the infestation in hand - the last straggling buds are just now being rounded up and incinerated - but the blooms are so frequent now and their faces are startlingly familiar.

ECDYSIS - Not a word you recognise. It's painted all over the city in many different colours by many different hands. The siblings who wrote it all grew up decades ago and have flown away. Now the word's being covered over with new graffitis and Klaxon Bombast's propaganda.

KLAXON BOMBAST - There are rumours of a path out of Stamp Colloquy and safely across the waste land, to a place where you can be forever fleshy and juvenile and never moult. Many of your siblings are emboldened by this. They reject the sky and want to stay in this easy adolescence. Therefore Klaxon Bombast is planning an expedition, through the metro past Mamma's nest and into the tunnels of the unmoulted and the old men. But for this he needs guns, armour, bodies, bullets and faith. Will you come?

THAT MADDENING ITCH - Unreachably deep under the skin. The thing inside isn't sleeping any more; it's looking out from behind your eyes. When it becomes unbearable you'll stop scratching and start clawing, until you've shed your self like Feely, Embargo, Faraway Deepness and all the others.

MAMMA DIED - Who is going to care for the larvas now, and guide their maturation? You can hear them crying down in the metro. Hundreds of them. Some of them have started to speak, but what they're saying disturbs you. Maybe you should eat them before they grow, because who knows what they'll become.

SWEET ANODYNE - She said she'd come back with all your brothers and sisters, their speech and sanity restored, but you'll all be winged and mute long before she returns (if she ever returns).



FEELY - "...controversial response to the society of upright women minister for propagation anders pike reiterated his earlier remarks quote the labour government upholds the parental rights of all its citizens not merely the bipedal and let me be clear there will be no legislation passed restraining the freedoms of private phenotypic selection we are a country of many peoples and the labour government celebrates this heritage..."

LARVAS - "...we see him oh our brothers our beloved sisters someone we think we ought have forgot in our passage but he followed us into the light please hold us mamma's breast is cold we cannot taste her and our bellies are so empty please..."


[ooc]A quick one-shot, which I'll be running in a few days.[/ooc]

Confusion reigns (the petty kingdom of my head). Care to give a bit more exposition, purdy please?

The city is inhabited by human (maybe) teenagers (maybe) who are essentially walking cocoons, and who are compelled to claw away at their flesh when the aerial monstrosities inside them are matured. The creature that birthed them has died in its nest in the subway, leaving its newborns (the larvae) to starve slowly and scream their eerily articulate traumas into the stale lonely air. One of the adolescents (siblings), Klaxon Bombast, wants to find a safe way out of the city. Sentient fungal blooms are erupting all over the city. Another charismatic adolescent, Carnival, reassures us that everything is well in hand, but probably it isn't. Deep in the subway there live all the siblings who matured but never shed their flesh; who are therefore grotesquely misshaped and deranged by confinement. The old men live there too.

It occurs to me that I should have called the sub way the "under ground", given where it's set.

Wow. Really cool. It's mind-boggling to me that you can create so many amazing micro-settings, jumping to another and then another. Though to be honest (in a hopefully complimentary and non-creepy way), sometimes it makes me want to tape your brain down, as I'd love to see what you'd do with one setting given more time to develop it.

Any chance the aerial monstrosities are related to the Locust or Secondborn from ARRUNTULLA?

Quote from: Rose-of-VellumWow. Really cool. It's mind-boggling to me that you can create so many amazing micro-settings, jumping to another and then another.

I suffer a nasty combination of chronic fatigue-induced brain fog and some sort of unidentified schizotypal disorder that really fucks with my ability to generate content like I did when I was a kid. My writing style has evolved over the years in order to work around those cognitive limitations (it doubles as a kind of therapy), but in short, it's easier for me to produce an endless menagerie of novel microsettings than to build something dense and detailed and epic.

In fact, I'm just about to write up another microsetting, called The Last Song of a Dragonnish Piper. I have no idea what it's about, but I like to start from the setting name and figure out the rest based on how that name makes me feel (somewhere between the sacred silence and sleep is a song lyric; Gaynor and Greed are two words that popped up in an auditory hallucination at the bookstore when I was shopping for my sister's Christmas gift; and you, ARRUNTULLA is a phrase that occurred to me out of nowhere but which evoked a particular kind of transcendent hysteria that was easy to represent in a setting).

I also have the tiny secret hope that people on this site like my ideas enough to emulate them. Highest form of flattery and so on. That's easier done if the settings are concise and compressed. I myself have taken inspiration from (off the top of my head) Steerpike, Weave, Superbright, sparkletwist, Vreeg, Ghostman, Polycarp and expecially Luminous Crayon. There's about forty handwritten pages of Jade Stage fan content floating around my house that Luminous will probably never see!

Quote from: Rose-of-VellumThough to be honest (in a hopefully complimentary and non-creepy way), sometimes it makes me want to tape your brain down, as I'd love to see what you'd do with one setting given more time to develop it.

If you never saw them, maybe check out Dystopia and -)- Dystopia (Revisited) and Glossolalia for a glimpse at what I was writing when I was seventeen, when I had a much more vigorous output. ENDLESS is another of my more involved projects. Also, The Convocation at Demonhead from earlier in this thread is an earnest effort to return to that longer format and, indirectly, to Dystopia. There's a lot more coming for it, but it's slow, slow, slow going.

Quote from: Rose-of-VellumAny chance the aerial monstrosities are related to the Locust or Secondborn from ARRUNTULLA?

The connection had occurred to me, but no. This is an entirely separate setting. It might exist in the same multiverse as Gaynor and Greed (the waste land around Stamp Colloquy is supposed to be a deranged future version of the United Kingdom) but it's tonally much darker, so maybe not. Besides, there might be such a thing as too much interconnectedness, especially since ARRUNTULLA is already set within Demonhead's universe (along with Green World Stories, A Book of Monsters, and others).

Quote from: PareidollhouseI also have the tiny secret hope that people on this site like my ideas enough to emulate them.

I pretty much joined the CBG entirely because of you, and have been following your work (along with Polycarp's, Xathan's, and Luminous Crayon's) since the WotC days when I was a bright-eyed teenager who'd just discovered D&D. I posted the first CE stuff because it felt weird only being on the site as a fanboy.

Oh the halcyon days of WotC. I wish I could recover my setting material from back then. For reference and posterity.

When I was in my late teens the CBG literally saved my life. I was off my tree with hallucinations and delusion, but this was a space where I could channel all my mind's weirdness into something useful.

GOD BLESS THIS PLACE

Thanks, Pareidollhouse; I now have a lot of glorious reading to do. :)

Quote from: PareidollhouseI also have the tiny secret hope that people on this site like my ideas enough to emulate them.

Oh, SA, the amount of times I've picked a choice phrase or word that spoke to me from your work and molded it into a setting might surprise you. LC also brought me to this sight, as well. GOD BLESS JADE STAGE.

It's good to know that I'm not the only neurodiverse member of the board whose diversity has a direct impact on how they right.

And the time for this may be long past - I needed to work up to courage to make this post - but I had a thought about the nature of New America for Gaynor and Greed. It's a sorcerous-libertarian nightmare where there is no iron law and everything is governed by predatory contracts that bind both legally and metaphysically. It might have the superficial trappings of Late American liberal capitalism but beneath the surface, it seethes with pure Dark Ages ruthlessness, utterly unmoored from entangling concepts like charity and empathy. All money is blood money. "In God We Trust" replaced with "Caveat Emptor." In New America, they do not conceal the rotten, bloody side of magic. Office hallways reek of damp wood and cured hides and echo with familiars caws. Sacrifices hang from streetlights.

That description is perfect in every way.

Dropped in for the SA writing, stayed for the glory-days nostalgia.