#cmwge ref

[kaaramel]

today i am: diagnosing each character’s arc in TWCFM with a color from Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine

here are links to the times i did this with lupin III movies/episodes and with other non-lupin media; if you are just now tuning in from home, it is my pleasure to introduce you to chuubo’s marvelous wish-granting engine, a tabletop roleplaying game heavily structured around telling stories

[kaaramel]

(smacks two special interests together like flint and steel) eight colors of lupin III plots, movies/specials edition - the remaining four colors, drawing instead from part I-II episodes, are here

films shown are:

Shepherd - The Castle of Cagliostro

Storyteller - Blood Seal: Eternal Mermaid

Otherworldly - Memories of Flame: Tokyo Crisis

Emptiness - Fūma Conspiracy

here is a link to the last time i did something like this, with other media; if you are just now tuning in from home, it is my pleasure to introduce you to chuubo’s marvelous wish-granting engine, a tabletop roleplaying game heavily structured around telling stories

[kaaramel]

(smacks two special interests together like flint and steel) eight colors of lupin III plots, episodes edition - the remaining four colors, drawing instead from movies/specials, are here

episodes shown are:

Mystic - part 2, ep 15: Two-Faced Lupin (Crude Reproduction, Perfect Frame)

Knight - part 1, ep 4: One Chance to Break Out

Aspect - part 2, ep 57: Computer or Lupin? (Alter-Ego Maniac)

Bindings - part 2, ep 58: The Face of Farewell at the National Border (Gettin’ Jigen With It)

here is a link to the last time i did something like this, with other media; if you are just now tuning in from home, it is my pleasure to introduce you to chuubo’s marvelous wish-granting engine, a tabletop roleplaying game heavily structured around telling stories

[kaaramel]

As a request, can you please explain the history of Town, or at least Fortitude?. I'm afraid that I might not be understanding something, and I really like how you explain things about Chuubo's, so if you could that would be a great help.

it would absolutely be my pleasure! under cut for Length

The original inhabitants of Town are the Jotun, fox-people, swan-people, assorted youkai, and so on. They lived on the shores of an inland lake with no sun, just a perpetual twilight. They prayed to a pair of deities, the gods of dream and nightmare; it's ambiguous how large a role of direction, protection, etc. dream and nightmare actually played in their lives, because most information about them has been lost in the modern day.

Humans began colonizing Town... (shuffles papers around) I don't think we have a solid Gregorian-calendar date for this. The earliest settlers were Russian and Japanese sailors; the site of the original settlement is now the Fortitude region. Many of the first residents, Jotun in particular, attempted to drive humans back out. The human-youkai war ended when the human Elizaveta sewed a pair of pants that caught the attention and favor of a swan-person, who declared Elizaveta "worthy" and by extension the whole human species. The story is related in more detail in a couple of places; the tie-in novel Fable of the Swan goes into it the most heavily.

Things settled into sort of uneasy cohabitation; humans were still a small presence without much social/legal power. The vampire Alexandrel Celdinar arrived in Town (a note in By the Docks of Big Lake estimates his emergence at roughly the 1800s) and saw an opportunity; recall that at this point the sun, a pretty fatal weakness to basically all but the strongest vampires in the setting, still never rises in Town.

Celdinar brought in more vampires and more humans (as a ruling class and as workers, respectively) and founded Night London, which he attempted to modernize in a slightly wacky zeppelins-and-steampunk way. The Celdinar Mayorality lasted... (paper shuffling again) "for a while," long enough to erect buildings and factories and so on... and, according to legend, the gods of dream and nightmare turned against him. A major earthquake wrecked a central district of Night London; the region that received the most damage is now Old Molder (which has been reclaimed by greenery at such an unnatural rate that only the upper floors are really inhabited), and the remainder has been resettled as Horizon, the gloomy Victorian Gothic-flavored region.

Mayor Celdinar might still have rallied and rebuilt, except, soon after that, the sun rose for the first time, marking the angel Jade Irinka's arrival in Town. At some point temple to Jade was built on Little Island. The sun is, variously, her chariot, her mansion, or her face; also it sets vampires on fire. The youkai lost power during Celdinar's rule, and have also been gradually interbreeding and assimilating with the human population. Humans become, and remain to the modern day, Town's most prominent and numerous residents.

The official timelines I'm looking at kind of gloss over the next period of Town's history; I assume there are some kind of events in Jenna's back pocket but they weren't considered relevant to the Glassmaker's Dragon campaign. There is, purportedly, a 'golden age,' but basically I've got nothing from here until the time when campaign-relevant events start happening. From here on out a lot of what I describe are going to include explicitly flexpoint which are heavily customizable (wrt people’s motives as well as exact chronological placement) for the needs and tastes of a given group.

Lord Entropy the First built Horizon's School... mm, again, a date isn't given but I'm actually going to assert it likely hasn't been in operation for more than 30-40 years. (Specifically I'm extrapolating from "No sooner did [School's SEED program] begin to bear fruit than he did," in CMWGE core, referring to Entropy's 22-year-old child.) In 1997, Entropy I died under mysterious circumstances, almost certainly expedited by Entropy II, who inherited his position as Principal of School and incidentally the King of Evil. Fable of the Swan implies that the Bleak Academy, an institution on the far side of unreality which trains Excrucian Riders to kill the world, was founded in opposition to Entropy's School. I am not sure to what extent this is poetic license and also time is less meaningful in the void.

Jade Irinka fell in love with the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy; the union bore at least one child, possibly two depending on how you count Arikel; after something like 3-8 years (flexpoints again) the Headmaster shoots Jade out of the sky with a black arrow, and the sun is temporarily extinguished, seen from Earth as a solar eclipse on March 7, 1997. A new sun appears in the sky, tied to Jade's daughter Jasper Irinka, and life carries on. Jade falls out of reality and fundamentally alters the cosmology.

This is a whoooole complicated event that is too much to get into on an already-too-long post, but to try and summarize the effects: there is no longer a clear division between real things and not-real things, there is just a dissolute fog of things-you-increasingly-don't-know-or-understand, referred to as the Outside. Town is possibly the last piece of reality unpolluted by the Outside but it's equally possible that this is a thing that varies with your point of view. Also, the change ripples over the timeline in such a way that this is effectively how it's always been, or at least families in Town have now been passing down techniques for mitigating Outside pollution for several generations. It's a massive headache and I'm sorry.

I think I will actually stop there instead of continuing to get more granular but I am more than happy to clarify and expand points if you have more specific questions!

[kaaramel]

thinking about CMWGE arc colors as narrative frameworks because it’s a useful concept that took me awhile to get, and slotting in some existing pieces of media, examples are nice to have

i’ll probably try and find another four to complete the set, especially if these are useful analogies for people (ETA: and here they are)

[kaaramel]

completing the set: examples of CMWGE’s arc frameworks taken from existing media; the first four are posted here (see also the bonus content “all eight colors as seen in SU plots”)

if you’re just tuning in and you're curious how this color-coded tool for understanding narratives relates to a tabletop roleplaying game, it is my pleasure to introduce you to chuubo’s marvelous wish-granting engine

[kaaramel]

Ah thank you. Most of my misunderstanding seemed to be thinking that the Sun that ended Night London was Jasper rather than her mom. Was kinda confused how Celidnar built and ruled the place within the time between Jade's death and Jasper falling to Town. As for further questions... I'm kinda not sure how the other Regions come into play. Like, the Waking Fields is where all the Yokai had gone after the fall of Night London, but how does Arcadia and Soma Village relate to all of this?.

aha, that would do it!

The Walking Fields to the west are Town’s agricultural base, and it’s true that most of the Jotun and dryads and assorted nature spirits ended up living there, but another significant contingent of youkai lives in Arcadia, Town’s major shopping district! The most notable populations are the fox-eared people (also called tenko or shop foxes), tsukumogami (objects that have existed for so long they awakened to life), and long-neck people (based on the Japanese rokurokubi), plus miscellaneous others. I don’t know that we have any particular information about the founding of the shopping district or any reason why so many youkai congregated there; it hasn’t been the focus of a campaign yet.

Information about Soma Village to the north is also pretty sparse; I don’t know anything about its founding or history. It’s the setting of the Halloween Special, but HS is an oddball little oneshot and not totally canon. I speculate that from the out-of-universe perspective it exists as: 1. a location far enough away you have to walk through the Outside to get there, but close enough that the path can become familiar, which is an important demonstration of the metaphysics;

2. it is a location for St. Vita’s Academy for Wayward Girls, which is useful if School ever needs a friendlier rival than the Bleak Academy for things like sporting events;

3. it is a place to put the monastery of the Zu, a faction of martial artists from the prequel game Nobilis who train until they’re powerful enough to rival gods.. but the Zu do not play a huge part in Nobilis either so I can’t really give you more than that.

There is a throwaway line in the Glassmaker’s Dragon late-arc materials which asserts that Soma Village mines for books, with absolutely no elaboration on what that means, but I include it because it’s the most fascinating and evocative thing I know about Soma Village.

Running down the list in Core to double-check: Big Lake is self-explanatory, although I want to note that it’s contiguous with basically any body of water anywhere if you navigate it right and it’s possible to end up on the lunar maria ‘seas’ if you navigate it really wrong. Celestia is the sky-kingdom ruled by Jade Irinka; it arrived in Town when she did and it became inaccessible when she died. That leaves Bluebell Park as the last major region, and I’ll mention it just to head off the question, I have no idea what’s going on in Bluebell Park. The landscape is very responsive to the emotions and secrets of people inside it and it doesn’t have a fixed location. There’s a passage in Fable of the Swan which might describe how it was created but I do not trust Jasmine as a reliable narrator at the best of times and the Bluebell Park segments are alas not the best times for her.

[kaaramel]

if anyone would like to take stabs at making their own, here’s a set of blanks (my examples here and here)

[kaaramel]

bundle anon again! the concept sounds directly up my alley as i tend to find combat in tabletop games really boring and don't like the more dark and gritty settings hhh. i only ask as it talks a lot about slice of life in descriptions of it, is there enough material to play an interesting story with sufficient conflict? i imagine so considering these are basically gods we're talking about

cool cool! hm, “interesting story with sufficient conflict” is.. vague? i don’t want to glibly be like “you can tell whatever stories you want, that’s between you n your GM!” because a lot of the current material is definitely optimized for that slower-pace, lots of emotional connection and honest hard work, ghibli-movie feel? but within that framework, like, teens can get up to a lot of drama even without Godly Shenanigans coming into it

here, let me grab the Glassmaker’s Dragon campaign materials - this is not part of the $10 starter collection but it IS in the bonus collection if you shell out a bit more - and i’ll just flip through and yell out some plotlines given for those particular premade characters

the core of the campaign premise is this:

“Once upon a time, a witch and a glass-maker made a dragon out of glass and taught it to hate the world. It raged and it would have destroyed everything; only, it shattered, instead.”

meanwhile, in and around that story:

a perfectly ordinary kid (give or take) begins to dream of a voice whispering to them to seize power. this will surely end well

nobody’s sure of the actual identity of the local high school’s student council members; they go masked and assume a corresponding persona when on official business, and mingle anonymously with the student body the rest of the time. they’ve got Plans for you

there’s a child in town who’s having vivid nightmares and the characters from their nightmares are attempting to break through to the real world. help ‘em out. mad science may be involved.

i don’t know how to describe this one except by copy-pasting the intro word for word. “The Troublemaker is poisoned in their dreams by the claw of a dead bird. (That happens.)” you know how it is!

if there are more than 1,000 cats living in town at any given time, it awakens a myth/spirit/something named Hedge the Fang who starts body-hopping around possessing the kitties with the intent of devouring and unmaking the local (sentient, talking) rat population, anyone who knows the legends about him, and possibly the sun

and so on, etcetera, and there is much much more going on in other regions of the setting, and more campaigns being developed; any of that catching your fancy? like, what sort of conflicts are you looking for if not?

[kaaramel]

increasingly occupied with doodling the glassmakers dragon cast as birds (this is pretty standard. i’m mentally assigning them pkmn teams as well you know how it is.)