#i have like lore stuff about it but its only relevant to empires really

[saym0-0]

general life series designs for Grian and Joel :3 their wings are clipped bc they cant fly in the life series and ik other ppl draw them tied back or straight up vanished but i feel like this way makes the most sense? like it doesn't directly injure them (although birds with clipped wings are often clumsier and hurt themselves on accident more often) but evens the playing field a bit

sketch in the corner is of joel and his wolves in 3rd life btw

and the other one was meant to be ren and martyn on skizzle point yk when they're cornered (also in 3rd life)

[sixth-light]

TGH/TDR vs WoT season 2: what's in and what's out pt 2 (worldbuilding)

This time we're doing concepts and settings introduced in TGH/TDR (or introduced in EoTW but not in S1 of the show).

Introduced in EoTW but not S1 Caemlyn Andoran politics inc. Tigraine's disappearance

Tar Valon was substituted for Caemlyn in S1 but I believe it has been confirmed as a setting for S3. In terms of information viewers need to remember, Andoran politics only *really* start to matter when we kick off the Succession plotline & I expect will be scattered throughout future seasons until we get to the main event in S5-6 or so. If Slayer is in S3 (I think this has also been suggested) then we could start to get some infodumps about the whole Tigraine & Luc disappearance drama there. (Side-note: I think show-only people are going to find it hilarious if Rand has an uncle Luke (Luc).)

Introduced in TGH Cairhien Daes Dae'mar Illuminators The Choedan Kal (not named) Ogier politics and culture The search for the Car'a'carn Seanchan/the Hailene The secret of the a'dam/sul'dam The Black Ajah The Accepted test

Still missing from the show but first introduced in TGH: Ogier politics and culture(differences between steddings), the existence and location of the Choedan Kal, and the Illuminators. The Ogier stuff may or may not EVER be relevant. The Choedan Kal can & should be introduced to up the stakes from Callandor when it proves too dangerous, although may get easter egg mentions prior, quite possibly as a Lanfear back-up plan. The Illuminators - again only necessary when gunpowder and its potential for weapons start to become relevant. They could be introduced in Tanchico if the plot goes there or as refugees from the Seanchan. (NB: I think show-only people are also going to be REALLY sideswiped by that whole plot, gunpowder weapons are so rare in the popular perception of epic fantasy. It's going to make WoT really stand out.) Another note: in the show the fact that the a'dam can be used on sul'dam remains a secret from the Seanchan and was not presented as an empire-shattering discovery, and the lore has changed so sul'dam are just very weak in the Power. I think there's a chance that in the show it becomes something known but suppressed in Seanchan rather than a genuine/complete rediscovery. Given how long channelers live that would check out; the books never make anything of it but Alivia is old enough that when she was born there were still a few free channelers in Seanchan. The 'Consolidation' was not a short victorious war but a multi-century period.

Introduced in TDR Tear (the city/Stone), Illian, and Ghealdan Darkhounds Wolfbrothers losing themselves Wolves and the Dream/prophetic wolf dreams Wide-scale ta'veren effects Tel'aran'rhiod Forsaken controlling nations (including specifically Illian, Tear, and Andor) Grey Men Callandor/the fall of the Stone Mat's luck Set-up for the Tower Coup Egwene as a Dreamer/Egwene's prophetic Dreams Balefire Fireworks as weapons

As with characters, there's a lot of worldbuilding from TDR that hasn't come into play yet! I think this is mostly for pacing reasons. On the other hand, we actually got a lot of Tel'aran'rhiod in S2 which aligns with TDR, a book where characters spend about half their time having prophetic dreams (or so it feels like).

Mat's luck and Egwene's Dreaming abilities - these are solid/obvious S3 arcs for these characters that they didn't have time for in S2. No question we'll see them next season, I think, although Mat's luck might have more of a slow-burn introduction than just suddenly working.

The Forsaken - have only just all been released! We'll certainly see them taking over nations in the next season or two.

Darkhounds, Wolfbrother lore, Callandor, fireworks as weapons - I think this has all been held back for pacing. Famously Perrin's plot needs to be spread out to give him stuff to do in later seasons. He might not get prophetic dreams though since it's a bit of a repeat of Egwene's Dreaming and never goes anywhere much.

Similarly, it's a Big Deal when Rand gets Callandor and then it...stays where it is for five books, that's not good TV pacing. I suspect he will pick it up just in time to try using it and fail against the Seanchan. And we don't need to think about fireworks as weapons until Mat is in a place to take advantage of the possibilities.

Balefire, widespread ta'veren effects, Grey Men - these are all things which pose the question 'why aren't they being used all the time' once they're introduced, and the latter two will be quite hard to effectively and efficiently do in a visual medium. We'll get balefire eventually but at a much higher power level for our characters, and the other two we might never get at all.

Tear and Illian - genuinely no idea when we'll get to these cities! Illian we may never visit as not a lot happens there that has to happen *there*. We'll go to Tear (the city proper) at SOME point but...depends on a lot of things exactly when.

[luetta]

Found your HDG×SIGNALIS Falke and other posts and had to ask how bioresonance would factor into the Affini's domestication efforts

Like there's the rare bioresonant humans, the kolibris, and falkes, plus maybe even a Red Eye if you decide it's canon in your fic. And uh, given what canon displays and tells us about it? it's a question I can't help but wonder about

Like Falke's would def use their bioresonance to resist, Kolibri's there's the question of if they're altogether or not (but iirc correctly their neutral patterns are allegedly unstable + altogether they might be easier to domesticate) humans are mixed bag cuz do they even know if they're bioresonant?

Oh yeah bioresonants connect to and read minds so that can play into how their domestication goes

Totally get if you dunno how to tackle this since lore's vauge af and you need to take your time. Hope your having a good day

aaa this is such a cool ask !! im well into starting to write the story, but im not yet at a point where there's been any domestication yet, so what ive decided is subject to change, but i have definitely been thinking lots about bioresonance and how itll be relevant. first things first is the canon. this is probably affected a bit by my own interpretation of the canon, but, im probably not going to touch the king in yellow/flesh below leng/red eye at all. for me, the whole story of signalis and all it's supernatural elements is essentially contained within a separate mindscape dimension and doesn't really effect the real eusan worlds. it'd also get a bit messy i feel, pitting cosmic horror against affini technological supremecy, cus like, who would win ? i literally dont know, and affini are meant to always win. so i think im just gonna let the flesh below leng chill. outta sight, outta mind. now, for bioresonance, i think it's fair to say there's similarities between it and biorhythms. given the fact that the eusans dont really even understand the mechanics and source of bioresonance, i feel content for the affini to come in and say "oh interesting, theyve managed to artifically (or naturally with rare bioresonant humans) amplify their biorhythms in their replikas" maybe ill add something about how theyve attuned it to idk, specific physical wavelengths, to induce something analogous to telekinesis. for kolibri's being easier to domesticate, you're right on the money for what ive been planning. theyre more perceptive to biorhythms and more receptive to xenodrugs. and virtue of their sharing of emotions and stuff with others, theyre definitely gonna be useful for, at the very least, calming other replikas and gestalts down while they get boarded and interrogated and domesticated EDIT: also with class-f drugs reducing intrusive thoughts/helping 'mind implant fuckery" work better, i think they could also be used to dampen/strength bioresonant effects too. if the affini wanted to i have a really fun plan for falkes, the first falkes to be domesticated are going to essentially be used against the eusan nation and empire, due to their supreme authority and bioresonance, having one telling everyone about the joys of the affini, to throw down their arms and surrender, is probably going to be a pretty huge boon in getting the governments to surrender. a falke unit is probably going to be the main character that ill follow through getting domesticated. i think itll be so fun having a falke be broken. one more thing ive been thinking about is about persona degredation. now, this seems pretty obvious to me in canon that persona degradation simply doesnt exist, and its just a name for any emerging individualism, which would mean a slight decrease in efficience, which means execution. but idk, ive seen a sort of vibe that ppl thing that not having access to fetish objects and strange things happening is gonna make replikes go crazy and corrupted and bluescreen, when thats simply not the case. that only happens in the game, which is definitely not reality. im going to follow this in the story, an affini showing up is going to scare the shit out of replikas, it's literally an alien. but they're not going to turn into brain broken zombies because of it, theyll just get freaked out and diverge from their blueprints. so yeah ^_^ thats some of my thoughts so far for the setting and canon and plans that ive managed to elucidate so far. thnx for asking !!

[verdantglow]

i hope you understand i am literally frothing at the mouth every time i see you've answered an ask, mine or someone elses. because i love your au so much its such good food for my hyperfixated brain (also i saw your tags and thats so sweet i need you to know its VERY mutual i come here immediately after i wake up to check if theres an answer because i get so excited)

okokok so. the games effect their lives outside the games. good to know. What about the serves theyre apart of? Eg Empires v Hermitcraft? Are those the ships theyre on? Will we be getting brief cameos of those who arent apart of the Life series? Or do they have no relevance to this au? What about other fandom popular lore? (Watchers and Listeners mainly)

I think it would be interesting if, even if Griann didn't make the games, he advertised them? Like a recruiter. Posted the flyers or website link everywhere he could, maybe thinking itd only catch low-bloods attention, and then Scar and the other high-bloods turn up.

Jiernfeijnferijfneriufneruinferinuferuifnerifuner9unfernuf I’m so glad you love this AU so much!!!

Hm hm hm…. I think that I’ll be keeping Empires/Hermitcraft stuff to references & cameos. Part of me is hesitant to include even more characters (18 main characters is already so much omg even with only focusing on a few at a time) but let’s be real, I won’t be able to resist tucking a couple of cameos in here & there. Like. Iskall’s gotta show up somewhere for sure. (I adore Iskall & would love to see him in a Life series actually; that man is deadly & hilarious.) & I’m certain folks would like to see Cub show up as an acquaintance of Scar’s. & then there’s Doc omg, I’ve gotta have Doc in there somewhere… plus obv Cleaoh knows Joe Hills in some capacity. (I just had the revelation that Juppet is a valid troll name & am losing my shit now.)

But yeah! Definitely some cameos, as I think the overarching plot for out of game will be revolving around various attempts at undermining & overthrowing The Condesce, & you’ve gotta have more than 18 people for a revolution of that kind if you want a chance at success.

So tbh I hadn’t even considered Watchers yet, but now I’m like… Watchers = a type of horrorterrors? I also think that the games ultimately come from them. Like Grian discovered the main code for them somehow (dream sequence? Automatic writing? Fished it up? Not positive yet….) & enlisted the help of one or more of his more technologically inclined friends to convert it to VLARP files. I definitely think it was Grian who brought everyone together, even if he didn’t initially mean for this whole group to be there. There was definitely some cases of friends inviting friends: for instance, Griann didn’t have much of a connection to Lizzie, but when he announced the Last Life campaign, Joel insists that his matesprit join them, so she ends up in that campaign. Also, Eethos heard about it from his caste mate Tangoh, who in turn had been invited by Impuls who was invited by Griann. & then Eethos brought in Cleaoh & Bedubs. So it’s a bit of a word of mouth marketing thing, but it all comes back somehow to Griann trying to gather people.

Having the Watchers be horrorterrors would bring in the possibility of Grimdark Griann, which sounds very fun. I really need to do some research into Watchers & especially Listeners as I’ve only got surface level knowledge of that whole thing.

(Also, I swear I have been working on who’s on which space ship, it’s just taking way longer than expected. I’ve written up blurbs about two out of six of the, & it’s already so long omg. Might need to break it down into 2-3 posts so it’s not just the largest wall of text ever.)

[acerace]

...you have opened my eyes to a vast universe of VintageBeef lore that I was unaware of. I knew about the New Hermit Order, of course, and the UHC invention, and I've watched a few of his CTM things but -- I will take all the info and lore you feel like giving out because Beef is amazing and my knowledge is so small.

Vintagebeef my beloved <3

So the thing is, right, until about 2016 I only watched two (2) youtubers- Vintagebeef for Minecraft and aDrive for Pokemon (and funnily enough both of them are named Dan irl). So I've watched most of Beef's videos over the years and have a general knowledge of most of his stuff, except because it's been like a decade I don't remember where most of the lore comes from XD

The thing with him is that he doesn't do Lore tm the way other mcyters often do lore- he doesn't have an extensive RP series to draw from like Grian, doesn't have a solo world with steadily increasing amounts of lore like Etho or Zisteau, and while he's played on SMPs and been involved in storylines before it's not really the focus of his episodes unlike with Evo or Legacy or Empires

So where does that leave us?

IRL, Beef always has multiple series running at the same time. Often he's playing on an smp while doing a singleplayer, often modded, series as well as a CTM or modpack with a group of friends. For example, right now he's playing on Hermitcraft, doing weekly Pixelmon and Building a Zoo episodes, and a CTM map with Slip. And to me, this translates to one thing: Beef is an adventurer. He travels frequently- he explores a world and when he decides he's done, he leaves for the next one. That's the basis of my personal interpretation of his series and his character for my writing.

Ok so reading this back, this got extremely long and didn't explain much in the way of lore, somehow? If anyone has any additions to add please do so, I am very definitely leaving out a lot and would love to see what other lore people remember and are using for Beef! I didn’t include the Hermitcraft stuff since my memory of season 4 is blurry (his base was themed after the Martian, that much I know, and he and Iskall were buddies :D) and most of the s5 NHO lore is best watched from Bdub’s perspective from what I remember, and the only s6 stuff is a single line in Hermitgang and then the Area 77 arc with its possibility of an NHO reunion which we did not get rip. And s7 of course had the cloning machine and also the Podzol Party as the main lore. So all the original rambling is still below the cut though it is very long, and I'm gonna bullet point the main stuff here instead:

Actual canonical things:

Invented UHC and was the only survivor of the first ever uhc (Mindcrack UHC s1)

Married to an ender dragon (one of the UHCs I think), later father to a different dragon (Mindcrack season 3? I think?)

Might not have legs if you choose to take that joke as canon (Mindcrack s2)

Was a wizard (RAD)

is a zookeeper (Building a Zoo) 

Had a wife and kids (Sims in Minecraft)

Part of the Trial of the B Team court case (Mindcrack)

NHO founder, founder of the Podzol Party (Hermitcraft)

Created a cloning machine that sort of works (Hermitcraft)

Played the Forest which is I believe the first time he and Keralis played together (look up the trigger warnings for this one, it's a horror game)

Was the creator/owner of Sourceblock SMP (featuring some familiar faces if you know Legacy, Empires, or MCC) and there is literal magic from a mysterious sourceblock of water that teleports people and summons mobs and probably more stuff that I haven't seen yet since I'm still watching it myself

Things you can infer:

Good with animals (Life in the Woods, Pixelmon, Ark)

Is a car nerd (irl and all of the car games he's played)

Is a highly experienced adventurer who has traveled through dozens of worlds both vanilla and modded, across multiple dimensions (Twilight Forest, the Aether, the Betweenlands, Limbo), completed dozens of monuments, fought in blood sports, survived apocalypse after apocalypse, tamed dinosaurs, and played a lot of prop hunt and golf with your friends

If you're looking for what to watch for lore purposes, I'd say the Mindcrack UHCs and Team Canada's RAD series are pretty good, definitely Sourceblock and HC s5, plus the Diversity CTM maps and Ruins of the Mindcrackers maybe? And Mindcrack Prank Wars for the chaos and the origin of Team Canada. And if you can handle horror than the Forest is fun and if you don't do horror you can watch the Pojkband play golf or prop hunt they're hilarious I love them sm I want a Pojkband reunion So Bad 

Beef's first series was a singleplayer series in beta 1.4_01 though he had played the game extensively before that, and was a big fan of Guude, having watched his own Minecraft videos. The series was functionally a hardcore one where if he died Beef would delete the world and start again! I haven't actually Watched this series so idk if he died or how often lmao. When Guude made Mindcrack, which was btw one of the very first Minecraft SMPs, he also hosted a competition for people to join, and Beef submitted a video (which is still viewable on his channel I believe!) and won, and was added to Mindcrack in season 2 :D (fun fact, Guude said that even if Beef hadn’t won he would have added him anyway) 

Two running jokes emerged from Mindcrack- pulling a Vintagebeef and Beef doesn't have legs. The first is a reference to Beef dying of fall damage (I believe the exact instance was him trying to jump into his swimming pool and failing spectacularly) and after the incident, every time someone died of fall damage they were pulling a Vintagebeef. The second joke comes from Guude, who joked that the reason Beef wasn't going to a convention was because he didn't have legs, and then he pranked Beef's base by building a giant pair of legs at the entrance to his castle so you had to walk between them to get into the base. This joke has long since died and both Beef and Guude feel pretty bad about it iirc because there were people who genuinely thought Beef was disabled and were emailing him supportive messages and stuff oops. So if you go looking on the Salad or find old Mindcrack fics, you might see references to Beef having prosthetic legs!

Mindcrack also brought about the creation of several Player groups- Team Nancy Drew, Team Canada, and GOB to name a few relevant to Beef. Team Nancy Drew consists of Beef, Pauseunpause, Guude, and Baj, who formed to investigate a prank on one of the members but I forget who. They're named Nancy Drew after the detective! Team Canada also formed in retaliation to pranks, with it consisting of Beef, Etho, and Pause, the three Canadian members on the server (not including Adlington who moved to Canada but never joined the group). There was also a Team America who pranked them with American flags everywhere. GOB is Guude, OMGChad, and Beef, who played stuff like the Ragecraft, Pantheon, and Monstrosity ctms together but that's way down the line lol

Team Nancy Drew is also notable for inventing UHC. It was Beef's brainchild but it was the four of them who first played it! The first UHC had the four of them working to kill the dragon with no natural regen, with everyone dying but Beef, who "won" the UHC. The second uhc was still dragon focused and iirc is where Beef married the dragon? Memories are hazy but they do kill the dragon in this one I think. UHC was then revamped as a pvp event and became a regular Mindcrack game every few months, featuring most of the Mindcrackers and several special guests, including Dinnerbone, who as we know Thanos-snapped Doc's arm out of existence as a result of Doc killing him in one of them

In one of the seasons of Mindcrack, Beef invited swedish Mindcracker and good friend Anderzel to go caving with him and invented ABBA Rules caving, where the winner takes it all. ABBA Rules is a game where each ore (and also dungeon loot like nametags) is assigned a point value and the person with the most points at the end wins and gets to keep all the stuff collected from the game.

In Mindcrack season 3?, Beef punched the ender dragon in an... awkward area, so when the dragon died and left the egg behind, Guude said Beef was the father of the egg XD I don't remember if I watched s3 so I have no idea if anything Happened with this concept but *history of the world voice* you could make lore out of this!

So Team Canada has played a Lot of CTM maps (which fun fact were pretty much invented by another Mindcrack member, Vechs, with his Super Hostile series! Super Hostile has a bunch of things called "Zistonian", which are references to another Mindcrack member Zisteau, who has a very wild singleplayer series with even wilder lore but I digress). In Ruins of the Mindcrackers, they had a running joke that Beef was Etho and Pause's mom, which is a joke we can leave in the past actually /lh. They also played all the Diversity maps, Sky Factory, Terra Restore, Uncharted Territory uhhh and a couple more ctms and adventure maps! Each map kinda has its own story so in Diversity 3 for example they were trapped in a simulation? I think? Team Canada also recently played the Roguelike Adventures and Dungeons modpack, aka RAD, in which Beef was a wizard with a magic staff that could do anything from summon lightning to control hostile mobs.

Sourceblock SMP is a vanilla survival 1.14 series that ran for one season and the series starts with each of the Players being drawn to a strange sparkling water source that, once they touch it, brings them to the Sourceblock world. It also summons a giant zombie at one point. There's probably more lore for this series but like I said I haven't watched it all the way through yet 

He has a Patreon server called VintageCraft and has done a series or two on there as well, and played a few UHCs with them, so lore that how you will! 

Beef also played a few popular mods, notably Pixelmon, Life in the Woods, and Feed the Beast, with LitW being singleplayer and the other multiplayer. He's also recently played the Zoo and Wild Animals mod a lot. He did a short series with the Minecraft Comes Alive mod where he married one of the villagers and had two children, so that's canon now :D he’s played a Lot of Pixelmon starting when the mod first came out iirc (he chose Turtwig in his first series and built a Grass gym, then made a Normal gym in another series in uhh 2016) and he still plays to this day. Quite a few Hermits played on his Pixelmon servers with him, like Wels, Etho, Iskall, Stress, Slip, Zueljin, and also Guude and Phedran (a Mindcrack adjacent player and creator of the LitW modpack) and a few Mindcrackers on the older servers 

Mindcrack and friends played a lot of other games too- 7 Days to Die, Ark Survival Evolved, Unturned, to name a few, so you can pull a lot of lore out of these as well. Speaking of friends and non-Minecraft games, Beef teamed up with Pause, Keralis, and Slip (a former Hermit) to play the horror game the Forest, which saw them stuck on an island trying to survive against terrifying mutated human... things. They played it a few times as the game updated but as afaik it's the first time Beef played with Keralis and possibly Slip and since the game starts with the Player's airplane crashing, that could totally be how Beef first met them in-universe 

I... think? that’s everything I mentioned in the tags? There is probably way more stuff I’ve forgotten that stems from inside jokes and things that happen within each series, but I hope that was a) helpful and b) at least somewhat comprehensible lmao 

[weaverofthreads]

On the process of writing a novel...

Ok, so this began as a DM to a very dear friend who had said they were super excited to work on a novel of theirs that they'd abandoned for years, but they felt a bit lost when looking at the project again. They had "too many characters, too many intrigues" and they didn't "know how to create order" for all their ideas. They didn't know "what to keep, what to remove, what to change" and wanted to know if I had any tips.  

I began to reply in messages and then realised I needed to make a whole post out of it, so here it is! All 3k words of it. This is for you, darling! I hope it helps.

Things I found extremely helpful when planning my novel for NaNoWriMo this year, after also taking some time off from it.  

Most of this comes from Alicia Lidwina’s Four-Part article on her NaNoWriMo prep process, and setting up a writer’s notebook, for 2018. You can find the link to the first part here and I highly recommend you check out the whole series of articles for a more in-depth read. 

Content of this ‘essay’: 

Preparation, Groundwork, and Materials

Project 'Stats' & Overview  

Mood, Moodboards, and Key Imagery

Things to Consider, and Important Bullet Points

Get to Know Your Characters  

Chronological Order

Tangential and Preceding Events

Basic Premise, Plot Definition, Sub Plot Ideas  

List of Locations

Scenes

Chapter Outline

NaNo Plan

Additional Notes and Tips for Writing

Ok. Let's begin.  

First of all, I'm not saying that this is the only way to write or organise a novel. It can be tackled in as many ways as there are writers in the universe. This is just the method I used to get my ideas crystallised and organised. 

Preparation, Groundwork, and Materials.  

Take your preparation seriously. I bought a cheap but still nice A4 sketchbook with blank paper for maybe £2 at the local hobby store, and used it solely for the purposes of being my Novel Notebook. It doesn’t have to be a pretty, perfect, Aesthetic(TM) journal at all. Its function is to act as a route-guide through the process.  

I bought a cute sticker from Etsy and used it as the front cover design so that I liked the book and that it felt a little bit special, without being too intimidating to put a mark in. Then I left the very first page blank, and opened it to the first double page. On the left, I wrote ‘Contents’ and then moved on to the right and wrote ‘Project Stats and Overview’.  

I used a pen that was comfortable to write with, which for me was important. I’m a very tactile person, and having nice paper and pens (not necessarily fancy), made the process feel good.

Project Stats and Overview

This is the bare bones of the book, and includes details such as:

Project Working Title: (in my case it’s Weaver of Threads)

Targeted Wordcount: (to give yourself an idea of the scope, but it’s not necessary. For me it’s 50-100k)

Genre: (for me, fantasy)

Series: (will it be one book or more? For me, probably more than one, and at least two).  

Inspiration: (here you can jot down all sorts of things which inspire your world and your writing, and it can be anything. In my case, I began with “density and lore, and feeling of being grounded in a real world from LOTR and Tolkien.” And I went on to include other writers and novels in the fantasy genre, as well as elements from our own world, such as Mongolian herding communities and way of life, the history of the Persian Empire, and Renaissance Florence!).  

Project Timeline: Give yourself a structure, and be realistic. If you know you’re a slow writer who’s prone to distractions, be generous, but if you’re someone who responds well to short deadlines, tighten the time frame up a bit. I said “November 2020 - November 2021 for the whole manuscript” because I know I’m a procrastinator who gets dejected if they shoot past intense deadlines….

Editing Deadline: December 2021-January 2022. I know I can edit fairly quickly, so I made this one much shorter.  

Main Requirements Prior to Starting: What do you need to get sorted before you can get going? It could be purchasing a laptop or figuring out a magic system. In my case, it was the latter.  

What Happens in your novel?: This is not ‘what do your characters do?’, but what, in one sentence, actually happens in the book. For Fellowship of the Ring, you could say ‘a diverse group of people assemble and set off together with the goal of destroying the Ring’. LOADS more stuff actually takes place, obviously, but that’s probably the key thing that happens in that book. So, write the same thing for yours. I’m not going to tell you what happens in mine, because that would spoil it :).  

That took up the first A4 page of my writer’s notebook, and after that, I moved on to Mood and Key Imagery. 

Mood, Moodboards, and Key Imagery

On the left hand side of the page, I wrote down the words and concepts that sprang to mind when I thought of the novel itself. These were in no particular order or placement — just a random cloud of ideas in a rough column on the left hand side of the page — and they included: history, mystery, love, friendship, betrayal, nostalgic, homesick, sense of belonging, sense of place, searching, closeness, secrets… etc. etc.

Then on the right hand side, I wrote down five key words that I wanted to associate with the novel. These would form the ‘visual aesthetic’ in the background of my mind, and could be very easily expressed with a moodboard.

This same process (writing down words and creating a moodboard) could be achieved on a website like Pinterest. Take your time with it, find the right visual clues that really match the essence of your story, and create a final mood board with a limited number of panels that will be your novel’s ‘true north’ when it comes to feelings. If you're artistically inclined too, you could draw sketches of things relevant to your world too.  

While this stage is really important for solidifying the feeling and mood of the novel, don’t get stuck here and spend forever procrastinating on Pinterest or whatever. Once you’ve crystallised that ambiance, it’s time to move on. It’s also perfectly fine to come back to this at a later stage if you find yourself running out of inspiration or drifting a bit. Daydreaming, drawing, mood-board-ing are all great ways to work on your novel on days when you don’t feel like writing.

Things to Consider:

Alicia Lidwina asked herself some questions which helped me get past the ‘block’ that I’d created when thinking about the novel, and those were:

What scares me about this story? (in my case it was the scope of it - it was easy for me to get lost in over-thinking tiny details and get too overwhelmed to handle the big picture)

What will readers take away from it? (in my case, I hoped that it was a sense of friendship, people from desperate cultures finding common ground, and a sense of being grounded in a real, tangible world.

What is its selling point? (essentially, why would an agent/publisher choose yours over the next one in the pile?). Don’t be bashful about this. This is your notebook, so if you’re proud of a feature or aspect of the story, write it down. In my case, there is no ‘Big Bad come to destroy the world’, no Chosen One who is the only one who can stop it. There is an antagonist, but it’s on a personal scale, and that’s the selling point. It’s about two people going on a personal journey to uncover a lost piece of knowledge that’s arguably not all that world-changing on its own, but which means the world to them.  

What will be the three biggest issues in writing the first draft? Identify the three biggest roadblocks, and then take a bulldozer to them. For me, it was time management, getting mentally stuck, and the sheer darned effort of it becoming overwhelming!

Important Bullet Points  

These are five key facts about your novel, distilled from the sections above. They include: What’s at the heart of the story? How long is the story? What’s the narrative focus of the story? What are the maximum number of main characters? And the maximum number of supporting characters (this obviously doesn’t mean you can’t have other, less important characters too!)?  

Relationship between the two main characters is forefront

50-100k words

The novel’s focus is on the characters’ main goal (had to be more vague here so I didn't give it away)

2 main characters

3 supporting characters  

If you find you’ve got too many main characters (not necessarily a bad thing to have a lot of characters - look at A Song of Ice and Fire after all!), then figure out whose story you want to tell here. You can always write another story with other characters in a connected novel, or a sequel. You don’t have to tell everything all at the same time.  

Speaking of characters… 

…Get to Know Your Main Characters:  

Here you can write character sheets for each of your main characters and cast. There are hundreds of these templates available on the internet, asking questions like ‘how would your character react to [insert event]?’ etc. to get to know your character. If this isn’t your thing (it isn’t mine) then at least write down some useful information about them. Rough height and weight, hair, eye and skin colour, general temperament, and any other defining physical or mental traits. 

Next came the Chronological Order

This does not have to represent the final order of the novel’s structure, nor the order in which you write the manuscript, but you need to know what happened within the timeline, and when, in order to be really clear when you’re telling the story. You can write the manuscript out of order, and you can tell the story with flashbacks or in a different order, but you need to have the underlying chronology securely in place so that your writing makes sense and so that you don’t confuse yourself or the readers in the process.  

Preceding and Tangential Events

These don’t need to be in the novel itself, but it may be important to define the sequence of events that also led up to the moment where we pick up your story, and what is happening elsewhere so that you can be sure of these too. In my case, I defined the events that concerned one of the supporting characters’ lives so that I knew how and why they were at the point they are in the story. It relates directly to - and heavily influences - the events of the novel, so I needed to have this person’s history nailed down as well, even though I don't tell it all explicitly in the book (because that would be unnecessary and a bit dull).  

Basic Premise, Plot Definition, and Sub-Plot Ideas (plus writing a synopsis)

Alicia Lidwina defined the story premise helpfully with the following formula:

Story Premise = Main Character + Desire + Obstacle

Pick a different colour for each of these components, and write a short paragraph to explain them in the context of the novel. Alicia Lidwina used the following:

[Main Character] “Harry, an orphan who didn’t know that he’s a wizard, [Desire] got invited into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and wanted to live his school life to its fullest, [Obstacle] but a certain Dark Lord who killed his parents is trying to rise into powers again and kill him in revenge.

Do this for your novel, and keep it really short.  

Plot Definition: This is even shorter than that! It’s a single sentence!! It’s most closely tied to the desire of the character, and lies at the heart of the story. It’s most likely a distilled version of the ‘what happens in the story’ from the Project Stats page, so check that to see what you wrote there.  

Sub Plot Ideas  

Five bullet points (no more) for things that are happening concurrently and which are related in some way to the main story. For me, Kae and Tomas are doing their research, so that’s the main theme, but beneath that there are a few other related incidents.

Writing a Synopsis - developed out of the points in this section, and includes:

Who the main character is

What the stakes are (the story premise is your guideline)

What the main plot line is

How the MC resolves the problem in the main plot line

How the book ends.

List of Locations  

Start with the main ones and add to it as you go on. Write a little bit of information about them so that you have something to refer back to. I also drew a big old map which I found very helpful and also really fun to do.

List of Scenes

It’s very important to map out every single scene that happens in the novel. Use your timeline to help with this, but remember a scene is not necessarily a chapter. You can have more than one scene within a chapter, but try not to have too many.  

I used small post-it notes (sticky notes) and wrote down things like “M joins K’s clan at the fire and K learns about magic” and “K studies at Citadel, intro to Citadel, magic, and characters” as separate scenes. Once you’ve written down everything that is going to happen (this will take some time! Get a drink and some snacks ready, and go slow), you can stick them into your notebook in the order you’d like to tell the story. Some chapters may have just one scene, while others may have two or three. I didn’t have more than two in any of my chapters, and actually ended up splitting some scenes that I’d made too vague in this section into more chapters. It doesn’t have to be set in stone, but it will form a road map.  

Additions and Notes:  

I left a section of the Scene Outline bit of the notebook blank for things to add in as I went along. I haven’t used it yet, but I might.  

Chapter Outline

I arranged the scenes into the chapters already by sticking them in order, but you could do a chapter outline separately after this. It’s up to you. 

NaNoWriMo plan:  

I did this back in October, and wrote down the main goal for nanoprep, which was to finish the background info. Breaking that down further, I listed - magic (how does it work exactly), geography, and politics. 

After that, it was just a case of writing the 1667 words a day. *spoilers, I got distracted and didn’t do NaNo this year* . What I should have done, was break it up into chunks and write down my goals so that I had something tangible to use as a road map, and I will be doing that now for the novel as I take it up again outside of NaNo. Having check boxes and manageable goals really works for me. Find what will work for you, and if it turns out not to, adapt!

Some final pointers and tips:

Set regular goals for yourself. Whether you work by saying ‘I’ll write 1000 words a day’ or ‘I’ll write something every day’, make a structure for yourself. If you slip and miss a day, week, or month (I didn’t meet NaNo this year because I chose to work on another project instead *slaps forehead*), don’t beat yourself up. Writing is a craft and it takes a long time and a lot of discipline to master a craft.  

Your first draft does not have to be good. At all. Your first draft is just words on paper. A first draft is the block of marble taken from the quarry, and subsequent edits and reworking is the process of carving the sculpture itself. The editing that is done by the publisher or the professional you employ to edit it for you later, is the final polishing. Don’t be demoralised if the block of marble seems very rough when it first lands in your studio. That’s ok!  

Take regular breaks. Writing is hard work, and most people can’t concentrate on something successfully for longer than 55 min's, and if you’re doing that, you’re already doing really well. Personally, I’m at 15-20 on a good day. Write in little sprints of ten minutes or so, and then get up and stretch, look out the window, maybe leave the room, come back in with a fresh approach.  

Stretch your hands, and wear wrist braces when you work. Seriously. I gave myself tendinitis on my first major project, and couldn’t use either hand properly for weeks. The ones I have are these, and they allow me to work safely for much longer.  

Keep hydrated. Have a bottle of water on the desk in front of you between your arms as you type and sip it, otherwise you’ll forget. 2 litres a day is usually recommended, but know your body and drink accordingly.  

Treat yourself. Whether that’s something as simple as a decadent hot chocolate after your first chapter/chunk/sprint is done, or a new notebook or a pen or that sticker set you wanted on Etsy or literally anything nice, reward yourself for the hard work you’ve put in, with tangible things you can look at or experience and say ‘I have that because I did the work’. It’ll help with your sense of achievement, especially if the project is a long one.  

Join a local writer’s group for feedback. With the current Covid-19 chaos, this is probably not possible right now, but getting constructive feedback on your work from someone who hasn’t been cocooned in the project in the way you are, but who respects you as a writer and wants to help you grow, will be invaluable. It’s too easy to exist in a little isolated bubble and think you’re doing ok, when in reality you could be creating bad habits which will be difficult to break later. By these, I mean things like ‘filler words’ you don’t realise you use, or other pit-falls it’s easy to tumble into when you can’t see the wood for the trees…It’s intimidating, and it might take some courage to work up and do, but I promise it’ll help you grow. You don’t have to do what the people suggest, but it’s great to get outside opinions all the same.

Submit work to writing competitions. This will help with showing agents and publishers later down the line that you’re not only committed, but hopefully talented, and will help you to push yourself. Use the world of your novel for the setting, and get to know it by writing short stories on the competition’s theme set there.  

Read. Read the writers you admire, and read them ‘actively’ - figure out exactly what it is about ‘that’ sentence that made you shiver, and use the same techniques in your own work (don’t plagiarise, obviously, but if it was alliteration that made the sentence work so well, use it yourself! Perhaps it was the metre of the line? Great, now you know a rhythm that will drive a sentence forward or slow it down etc.)

Enjoy it. If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, it’ll show in the work. Take a step back if you start floundering, and ‘interview’ yourself about why it’s not fun any more. Refer back to the sections in the notebook that helped to clarify the plot/process, and see if you’ve wandered away from them. Make yourself answer questions like: ‘What is the main reason I don’t want to do this?’ ‘What is the character’s motivation?’ ‘Should I scrap this section?’ (don’t delete it, but cut and paste it into another ‘scraps’ document, and then start afresh from the last place you were happy with. Nothing is wasted - it all goes into building the world and getting to know the characters, even if it doesn’t get explicitly told in the finished product, so don’t be afraid to do that last bit).  

Good luck!

I hope you found this helpful, and if you have any questions or things you’d like to add to this, please feel free to send me an ask here on Tumblr.

If you’re a new writer hoping to get an agent or publisher, you might also find this post on ‘talking to a published author’ helpful or interesting.

If you would like to keep up to date with my own novel’s progress, you can follow me here on Tumblr, as well as on my writing Instagram @rnpeacock

[sepublic]

Starkiller Base was unnecessary

           Re-watching The Force Awakens, and… It’s occurred to me that, even more than I initially thought, Starkiller Base is a genuinely useless, pointless part of the plot that’s just shoehorned in for the sake of arbitrarily raising the stakes, in a blind attempt to redo the Original Trilogy while one-upping it at the same time; Taking pot shots at the original Death Star’s ‘absurdity’ to try to make Starkiller Base’s destruction feel more ‘involved’ and ‘sensible’ with having an inside job to sabotage and blow up key components, yadda-yadda; Almost feels like the writers are punching down at the Original Trilogy in a vain attempt to look more clever and ‘self-aware’, without considering how reckless power-scaling doesn’t work (Which we see once more and somehow even worse in The Rise of Skywalker).

           The thing about why the Death Star works is like… It’s relevant. It has build-up. We’re introduced to it from the start, the entire story revolves around destroying it; R2-D2 is important because he has plans to the Death Star, Vader is seen chasing Leia because she had those plans. It all comes around to and circles back to the Death Star, we have a sense of what it is from the start, there’s build-up. You NEED the planet-killing machine for the climax of A New Hope, because the only reason to go there is because, surprise- The Death Star IS there, it just arrived right besides Yavin IV!

           But Starkiller Base… When you watch the movie, it just pops in out of nowhere, amidst the pre-established plot threads. Without any prior context or build-up, we’re just suddenly treated to a shot of this huge, mechanized planet, and then Hux almost casually drops that the ‘superweapon’ is ready, and then suddenly it’s firing and blows up the Hosnian System. The Death Star is justifiable because it’s the first of its kind, Starkiller Base is the third. In canon and Legends, there’s a lot of side-material going into the sheer enormity and horror of the Death Star, the amount of manpower it takes to construct such a thing, its formation is treated with gravitas; And yet something WAY bigger and more advanced comes out of nowhere, from a group even less powerful than the Empire?!

           Again, you need the Death Star, it’s why the rebels are being chased, it’s why Leia was captured, it’s why R2-D2 meets Luke and then Obi-Wan, bringing up the Rebel journey; It’s why Luke’s aunt and uncle die, it’s why there’s no Alderaan and instead the Death Star itself to capture the protagonists when they arrive there. But Starkiller Base is pointless- The plot is about BB-8 because he has the map to Luke Skywalker, it’s about finding Luke through BB-8. Starkiller Base is just so casually dropped for something that should be so much bigger than the Death Star in the narrative… And likewise, we don’t need it for anything.

           Is it to prove to Finn that the First Order is dangerous, that he can’t just ignore its destruction? The thing is, he already has Rey’s capture to motivate his participation. Starkiller Base could not fire, but Finn would still help the Resistance infiltrate, because Rey would still be captured. It’s not needed for Poe and the Resistance to arrive on Takodana, because they came for BB-8 after getting that message, the Hosnian Cataclysm totally unrelated. You could argue it gives the Resistance an excuse to fight back against the First Order in the film’s climax… But that does not justify creating another superweapon, much less one as implausible and redundant as Starkiller Base.

           Like, maybe the writers wanted to REALLY return to the status quo, so having the New Republic be devastated was a requirement… But was it really? Just have the New Republic continue to be ineffectual, it’s even a plot-point in side material that its military is embarrassingly small; So just say the Resistance IS the full extent of that military! You still get an underdog situation. And again, if you really want to forcibly cut off any support for the Resistance… You don’t need a giant superweapon to one-up the Death Star. Just have the First Order demonstrate its traditional military power, by having a fleet invade the New Republic’s capital, unexpected, able to waltz in because everyone is so incompetently lax about these rising fascists; And with recent real-life events, it only makes more disturbing sense.

          Instead of getting a pointless superweapon, have a bunch of Star Destroyers attack Hosnian Prime and take it over, show a montage of destruction and civilian death, etc. This still establishes the danger of the First Order and how it’s quickly decapitated the New Republic and left it in shambles, setting the stage for the underdog conflict; But you don’t have to rely on something as absurdly over-the-top as Starkiller Base, which has no build-up to its unprecedented firepower besides “Oh yeah this exists” and then watching it fire and finding out firsthand.

          The death of trillions with the Hosnian System is senseless violence both in-universe and from a narrative, writing perspective… And again, this arguably establishes the First Order as a threat better, because they don’t need to rely on a superweapon; And even after The Force Awakens ends, the audience still knows that they have access to an entire fleet… Whereas with Starkiller Base, that threat is lost by the end of the film and thus made redundant. The scene could become even more disturbing if we straight-up see some civilians on Hosnian Prime welcome the First Order, adding additional world building that helps explain why the First Order was able to develop, how it got support- And again, being topical to what happens today. It connects with canon lore about the First Order’s supporters in other worlds (such as Coruscant), and could even be a callback to liberty dying with thunderous applause in Revenge of the Sith! We could still have the people on Takodana react in horror, through the Holonet’s broadcasting of the coup.

           Of course, this is Star Wars- And what’s more iconic than thrilling space battles and trench runs? Sometimes you want sci-fi fun and stuff for the sake of it, nothing wrong with that, that’s always important too… But again, you don’t need a giant super-laser to have that. Just make up something else; Like Starkiller Base is the planet that the First Order has taken over. Perhaps they intend to launch a bunch of new Star Destroyers, or are about to finish production of a whole new batch, which would make things even worse. Instead of destroying a superweapon, you could have the Resistance crippling the factories that finish these Star Destroyers- There’s your trench run! Have them blow up a power plant that’s running the factories, instead of a thermal oscillator. There’s still a victory at the end, and while the threat is far from over, time has been bought- And it makes the First Order’s immediate retaliation in the next film more sensible, adds to the idea that every second, every bit of progress helps, you gotta take what you need… Even an extra day to prepare and evacuate is a miracle that furthers the underdog motif.

           Plus, with a batch of Star Destroyers that need to be stopped- There’s still the need to rescue Rey. The Resistance still needs to cause damage at the First Order’s base, and Finn is still needed to infiltrate and lower the shields, while taking advantage of this operation for himself and Rey. Most importantly, you don’t get a contrived superweapon that only adds to the bland, carbon-copy standard of the Sequel Trilogy; And perhaps best of all, we don’t have to see Ilum retroactively bastardized and destroyed, with Starkiller Base’s identity revealed AFTER we see it get blown up… The legacy of the Jedi and its history is not further destroyed with the loss of this sacred planet of kyber crystals.

          And that’s better, because this trilogy about passing the torch, seems as insistent as Kyle Ron, the villain, on interpreting this theme as utterly wiping out all traces of the past, and leaving nothing for the next generation to work with. Which, I’m not surprised at a corporation thoughtlessly razing and salting the earth in selfish disregard for those who will need and use it afterwards, but still. And while a star that burns brighter than most thanks to its heart of Kyber IS a neat concept that could be worked with, especially with what Chirrut Imwe says, in addition to the motifs of flames of rebirth and the Phoenix… It’s not something that justifies the further eradication of Jedi history and effort on a level that even the Empire didn’t go, just to arbitrarily raise stakes with yet another uninspired superweapon.

           Like, the Duel of the Fates script and its concept of a device that blocks off all inter-galactic communication is MUCH more interesting, clever, and innovative than the Death Star Lite, and it hits closer to home in this age of internet and mass communication; In contrast to the Death Star, which fit more in its time as a criticism of the stockpiling and development of nukes, and how that tapped into the public’s fear at the time of nuclear Armageddon. And a device blocking off intergalactic communication provides good reason for why the Resistance doesn’t have the full might of the New Republic behind them, because they can’t even communicate to collaborate, and it adds to that idea of people made to feel ‘alone’ or whatever and thus isolated, so they can’t band together and rise up. That adds to Rey feeling alone, and makes Poe and Zorii’s discussion at the end of the trilogy that much more meaningful… Not that the Sequel Trilogy was planned to consider the latter, of course.

           (Actually, I wonder if it’s possible to cut Starkiller Base’s superweapon scenes from the film. Like a cut where any references to its superweapon, and the scene where it fires, is cut out; I think the film might still work that way.)

[dragon-grunkle]

star wars and flight rising are in the same universe and here’s why, a ted talk by stanley

in an effort to both 1. talk about my lore more often like i’ve been meaning to and 2. explain what i meant when i went off about it in the tags of my last post, i’m gonna attempt to explain my rationale for deciding star wars and flight rising can totally coexist in the same universe.

there’s a tldr at the very bottom! i do use rebels as a basis for some of this lore, since it basically just confirms concepts i was already thinking of before i even watched the show, but it IS a little spoilery sometimes.

SO. what do we know about sornieth? here’s a summary: it’s the fourth planet from its sun. it has at least one but possibly two or more moons. powerful beings of pure elemental energy sprung up in the early days of the planet’s formation. a darkness from beyond attacks the planet, and the gods build a pillar to keep it out. after this, humanoid races flourish and they learn to combine magic with technology, but eventually someone gets too arrogant and builds a big machine that blows up all of civilization. from this, the arcanist is born. he grows curious and encounters the shade, which breaks the pillar. the other gods see this and decide to go their separate ways. they create dragons.

this new society has reached a point roughly equivalent to the 1920s, and that’s as far as we’ve gotten. that’s it, that’s flight rising. no aliens mentioned, except for the shade (and possibly the forbidden portal enemies if you count those, but that’s for another time).

what about star wars? as we all know, it’s set ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’. there is a lot of history here that isn’t really relevant, so i’m just going to talk briefly about the layout of the galaxy: it isn’t named, but there are different sections to it that are, and they’re grouped according to how far away a planet is from the center of the galaxy. you have: the core worlds, the inner rim, the mid rim, the outer rim, and wild space. generally, planets are more densely populated towards the center of the galaxy and less as you go out. compare coruscant, a core world entirely covered by a city and inhabited by trillions of people, to tatooine, an outer rim planet that wookieepedia states has 200,000 inhabitants total. 

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where does sornieth fit in this map? the answer is simple: wild space. this region lies beyond the outer rim, where not many bother to travel because it’s just not worth it, and it’s where i’ve placed sornieth in this scenario. wookieepedia says:

Unlike other regions of the galaxy, Wild Space existed along the entire circumference of the galactic disk and on the borderlands of the Unknown Regions. It was inhabited by sentient species but not fully charted, explored, and civilized.

star wars: rebels touches on wild space a bit: one of its main characters is a lasat, a species thought to be wiped out by the empire. lasats come from lasan, but they have a legendary ancestral homeworld called lira san. except it turns out that lira san isn’t a myth: it’s real, it’s populated, and it’s in wild space.

the fact that an entire species believed their original homeworld was a myth means we can easily set sornieth there without ever having to worry about political groups such as the republic, the empire, and the rebellion coming across the planet and mucking up our established rule of No Aliens Besides Shade (And Maybe Arcanist). it’s conveniently out of the way AND protects the lore of both continuities very well, ensuring that they don’t interfere with each other by introducing a previously-unheard-of super-powerful flying magical race to the galaxy, or having stormtroopers invade the southern icefields, or something else fucky like that.

------

now that we’ve got location covered, we have to talk about the force, magic, and the gods. i’m gonna get a little handwavey here, but it’s also, i think, the most interesting part of this whole thing, so here we go.

first off, the force. what is it? here’s how obi-wan describes it in a new hope:

It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.

with that description in mind, i want to draw attention to one little throwaway line from the flight rising lorebook chapter 1: the first age: 

From this bedlam, the magical energies themselves began to concentrate and change. Similar particles receded into four great beings, each overwhelmingly dense with a different element. As if eager to proudly display their emergence to some unseen divinity, these beings took on the shapes of great wyrms.

that ‘unseen divinity’? yeah, that’s the force. you could even take the ‘similar particles’ bit to mean midi-chlorians, if you want to acknowledge the prequels’ interpretation of the force.

as we know, some people are stronger with the force than others. these people usually become jedi or sometimes sith, depending on whether they use the light or the dark side. but the jedi and sith aren’t the only force users out there: there are plenty of civilizations who have different names and explanations for it and how it manifests itself varies from person to person. in fact, the lasat people i mentioned earlier recognized the force as something called ‘the ashla’. so different concepts for the force exist across the galaxy, and it’s very possible that what we know as ‘elemental magic’ on sornieth is simply how dragons see different aspects of the force. as if that wasn’t enough, we also know some force users can use the force to manipulate the elements themselves, like how palpatine can use the dark side to create lightning.

so really: i don’t think it’s a stretch to say some intensely powerful creatures born of the universe itself could specialize in a specific aspect of the force and manifest entirely that way.

[billy mays voice] But Wait, There’s More! i’m gonna reference rebels again. yeah, i know. on the planet of atollon lives the bendu, a being of the force who is neither light nor dark. he’s powerful, and at one point, turns himself into a giant storm and strikes down ships with lightning to defend his planet. loth-wolves are a similar concept. they’re animals which are shown to have a deep connection to the force, but only as it relates to the planet they call home, lothal. at one point a character asks if the loth-wolves are on their side and the answer is "they're on lothal's side.” this is how i see the gods as existing in the greater star wars universe: powerful beings intrinsically linked to the planet they originate from. they’re capable of great feats on their own, but can guide others (like humans or dragons) to use the force / magic in their stead.

the gods are real inasmuch as the force is real, and act as extensions of one another. if we wanna go a step further, the deities could all be light-side users and the shade is their dark counterpart, which is a REALLY fun concept to explore.

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phew, that’s it. i’ve covered most of it except for how dragons get off sornieth and into the wider galaxy, which is...somewhat less essential than the stuff i talked about above, but i still want to address it, especially since we’ve established they have no outside contact and are limited to 1920s tech. to keep it brief, the easiest answer is...magic.

i don’t want to get tooooo deep into rebels stuff again, but space-time portals do exist in star wars, which is really exciting for me personally, and also a nice setup for dragons to get out into the galaxy - if they have access to them, that is; in rebels they only appear in a jedi temple, but i think it’s possible other access points exist, given that other force-societies also exist. the point is, being handwavey and saying ‘eh, portals’ is a valid excuse that doesn’t totally break either universe because they are canon to both universes. you could also go the route of magic experiments gone wrong, the deities picking off a few special individuals and sending them out, or crazy lighning-arcane tech mergers shooting dragons off into space, never to be heard from again.

there’s any number of possibilities here, ranging from crazy space wizard shenanigans to early spaceflight gone very very wrong.

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tldr: sornieth is located in the far reaches of the galaxy, away from major events, and has remained undiscovered. the deities are manifestations of the force channeled through the planet itself; the gods and the force are extensions of one another. sometimes dragons can get off sornieth, but not often, so dragons are rare in the wider galaxy. there is no conflict of lore that says these two things CAN’T exist in the same universe, and in fact, the lore sometimes even supports them coexisting.

or in other words: star wars and flight rising coexist because i want them to, but also because i have legitimate justification for it. i’m too powerful and nobody can stop me from making star wars dragons now.

[animatedminds]

All The Upcoming Star Wars Content...

... has my nerdy self quite hype at the moment. I’ve said pretty stringently in the past - though perhaps not here - that the primary thing the New Expanded Universe doesn’t have that the Old Expanded Universe did was time, and as a result content. The Old EU had the time to establish really amazing bits of content that thus distracted from the large swaths of it that were not very good at all (and all in all, it’s those large swaths that make me not miss the Old EU all that much - certain very specific parts excepted (one of which, the Rogue/Red Squadron media, is now officially returning to my joy). Ideologically and tone wise, the whole just started fraying and losing itself, not to mention the snarl of contradictions) - it’s easy to forget in the moment that the old days had loads of Star Wars content as well, but at the very least I do miss that accessibly. The New EU hasn’t had that time to build, leading to people just judging it based on whatever has come out lately and forgetting what just came out a minute before, and leading to the franchise itself only releasing new content sporadically thus far. Reception-wise, the Mandalorian has wildly overshadowed the Sequel Trilogy (which had its ups and downs but largely had downs, all in all), which itself overshadowed the side movies which were overall better, and all of them overshadow the comics (which are for the most part some of the best content the franchise) and The Clone Wars (which is even more one of the best things about the franchise) and so on. But just like the Old EU, this affect will wane over time as new media enters the franchise, as more media brings more accessibility to the franchise.

That lack of content has led to one of the other big things I’d said about the new direction of the franchise, which is that it really, really needs context. The ST rather aggressively avoided delving into any context for anything that was going on whatsoever. We had no context or attachment for the New Republic, not even a character who cares specifically about it, so the shock of Hosnian is lessened. We have no context for anyone who shows up in the climax of TROS, and thus all those new people might as well have come in out of the ether. New concepts and character avenues were eschewed in favor of twists and variations on classic ones. We were left with a plot that tried to be in a vacuum, and ultimately lacked a lot of the substance it could have had. 

I’ve hoped for a long time that we could get an epic length Filoni series that filled in the blanks of the Sequel, and build and refine that substance the same way The Clone Wars did for the Prequels.

On that note, let’s look at the upcoming stuff: Andor, Bad Batch and Kenobi look like stories set between ROTS and ANH (so, rise of the Empire stuff), plus Lando if it stars Donald Glover like I suspect. Rogue Squadron is definitely going to be an Original Trilogy movie (I wonder if they’re going to recast Luke...). Rangers of the New Republic, Ahsoka and maybe A Droid Story are going to be between ROTJ and TFA (so, rise of the New Republic stuff). And Visions is going to be an anthology series. So... it looks like they’re pulling back from the sequel era and not giving that any context or content anyway, which is a shame, but I’m more than happy with what we’ve got. I’ve already said that the return of Rogue/Red Squadron as a narrative sub-franchise is the things I’m most excited for, but I’m definitely looking forward to Ahsoka, Kenobi and the Lando show, as well as basically everything else. And I’m really excited to finally see what this High Republic era worldbuilding is going to create in its wake, as its an idea that could be full of new potential if they approach it right. I do really hope that at some point we get something that finally delves into the largely unexplained lore quagmire that is the sequel era’s world, but if they think they need to hold off to get something that does that just right, or have to make a specific plan for it, all the better if that means what we do get actually does the job in a way it deserves.

It doesn’t come out much because this is a primarily animation blog (though Bad Batch and Visions are animated, so still relevant!), but I’m an enormous Star Wars fan and have been for decades. I’ve long wanted the new era to really stretch its legs and show its potential, and it looks like they’re finally starting to do that. So hopefully, the force will be with us and all will be well.

[irkenheretic]

okay i promised id do it and im doing it: Explaining The Plot Of That AU I’m Vague About: The Post

(as i was preparing to write this i actually got my 250th follower, which slapped)

so i’m just gonna start with the simple version, which is this: it’s a rebel AU which primarily centers around the tallest, who are both defective. they give up on trying to make any meaningful changes as figureheads, and instead direct their attention to being involved with the “neo defect revolution,” or NDR. they do manage to make one change as tallest- there is a garbage dump planet turned into a sanctuary for defectives (who in this au are executed once discovered,) and eventually enough of the populace finds out about it that the tallest have to deal with it. they finesse their way into kicking it out of the empire, so now it’s its own planet with its own rules, governments, and most importantly, immigration policies and protections

a lot of stuff happens and it’s gonna be structured using arcs, and each arc has a separate protagonist/deuteragonist/tritagonist lineup (but that doesnt mean the same lineup won’t be used multiple times!) and yes the insane list of OCs are for this au alone: some arcs are very OC-centric, some have OCs as supporting characters, and a couple are all-OC or mostly-OC. 

its going to be very longform and it’ll span from the tallest’s elite training days to twenty years after zim arrives on earth. (the 20 year gap btwn zim arriving on earth and the story proper isnt as tightly plotted as later tho.) the point is to see how a revolution on the scale of the NDR works, who was fucked over by defact laws, who was fucked over by other laws, etc. theres a lot of lore and a lot of headcanons i made for this AU and even a conlang. i am a being of hubris. itll be a series of fics, some multichapter and some oneshots. 

the series as a whole is gonna be called Invader Zim: Annexed or just Annexed for short. its a pun on an irken word that sounds similar but means the exact opposite. i am not explaining more bc itll be explained in the fic itself. but thats why the tag for it is #anx lmao

i didnt mean for this to be as long as it got but under the cut im gonna breakdown some of the early arcs:

so it all starts with a fanfic called Love Is The H-Word (no the “h-word” isn’t “hell.) it centers around red and purple as elites-in-training, who do a little whoopsie and have an egg. purple doesnt wanna smuggle it into a smeetery, bc then he’ll never see it again, so they go to the defect sanctuary (still a part of the empire at this point.) purple knows he’s defective while red has a hard time accepting that he is as well, due to events from his past. but being around all these other defects are starting to wear down his denial, and the fic is all about that. it also sets up some plot stuff, like how defects adopted a self-identifier in the word “heretic,” hence the sanctuary being named, “heretirk.” (hey look my url!) (no, the “h-word” is not heretic, either.) 

i dont wanna say what happens in that fic bc spoilers, but stuff Happens. its also when we meet some ocs that end up being important, and the existence of others are foreshadowed. this is also where we meet the tallests’ future advisor, rarl kove, for the first time, as a local who decides to keep them company. purple bonds with kove due to their shared interest in politics, while red reluctantly bonds with titch, a young irken (a smeet in heretirken standards, an adult in imperial standards- did i mention he and red are roughly the same age? lol) who is interested in military stuff and thrill-seeking and general destruction. titch is pissed because he claims his father is stealthing on devastis as a military commander, but won’t let titch sneak in as a soldier, as titch is deaf. 

(fun facts: in the au, “titch” is regional slang for “a little bit.” ironically, titch the character is above-average in height.)

due to titch’s deafness, he developed “gesturespeak,” irken sign language, so he can communicate. this existing becomes important later

a oneshot called invade the system is right after h-word in publishing order. it details zim’s exploits in leaving foodcourtia, where he was assigned and infiltrating the invading academy he eventually graduates from (in this au, zim is too short to be an invader, which sucks because the hight minimums for the military are really short to begin with lmao)

the fic chronoligically after H-Word focuses on red and purple being back in their platoon on devastis, specifically red navigating his training and his relationships with two defective platoonmates, pon and zi (who are in h-word a little,) after the realization that he too is defective. it also focuses on how the irken military works, and how they train their soldiers. 

the first arc overall focuses on red and purple going thru training and such, and ends after they graduate and are on the field, working to get commander rank. (they planned to gain commander rank then leave and go back to heretirk to train an army there, as heretirk has.... no army.) in the middle of this, they’re pulled out and told they are to become the next tallest. they debate over staying and taking the job or just running to heretirk, and they ultimately decide to stay.

the next arc i call the “bridge,” tbh. its less tightly plotted than the other arcs; fics are spread apart from each other chronologically and all that. it spans the time after the tallest being appointed to a little after zim arrives on earth. it also has a couple of anthologies focusing on imperial defects- each chapter is a new character. these guys are all important and the easiest way for me to introduce their backstories without cluttering everything up is anthology style, lmao. other things that happen are a look into how the tallest work, eventually culminating with the resolution of the tallest having to Deal With Heretirk, tenn’s rescue from meekrob, and zim on earth obtaining a half-irken smeet named pip due to stealing an Unethical Science Experiment from dib (which is pip.) the bridge is basically just. “heres some stuff that happens between point A and point B so when we get to point B you’re not confused as all hell.” 

the next arc focuses on zim. in the first fic, pip is sick and zim is trying to get into his neighbor’s pants, to cope. this basically sets up that zim in this au has no idea how to find personal fulfillment in living- he’s only OK if he focuses on pleasing someone else, be it taking care of pip or doting on the neighbor, some rando human named piqu (pronounced, “peek.”) this is mainly a cute romance story with the underlying veneer of “a child is slowly and painfully dying” in the background. fun! 

without spoiling the circumstances, zim and pip end up on heretirk, which at this point is its own independent planet. pip is in the hospital for most of it so zim has to do his own thing. computer fans rejoice bc hes basically zims dad at this point, who tells him to go outside and get some fresh air and talk to the locals instead of schmooping or screaming in anxiety. im sneakily introducing more characters like ini, the “next-gen zim;” a short bio-engineer (she works on PAKs) who was constantly passed over by everyone because they dont trust someone that short or they dont trust someone that spazzy, even though shes actually brilliant. also her brother mo, who’s a pilot that NOBODY will teach military-class ships to (at this point, HTK has a population of ex-military that had their old ships, but still no formal army) because he doesnt talk and they think hes “slow” as a result. for the curious, he is physically able to talk most times, he just doesnt like it. zim ends up teaching him how to fly military-class which ends up being important laterrr

(haha ini and mo. wheres meenie and minie? ILL GET TO THEM)

no really, theyre quadruplets. named ini, myni, minie, and mo. these are real characters. 

minie isnt introduced till later. shes too cool to be the side character in someone elses arc. she is feel uncomfortable when we are not about her.

myni is busy palling around with pip and pip’s friend “elly” (real name elevenn, with two N’s.) elly is a half-meekrob War Crime Baby and tenn’s smeet. he has vision problems (he can “see” energy signatures of things, as opposed to conventional sight. everything is monochrome and he has to really focus to see like, words on a paper. also fuck tablets) but the trade-up is telekinetic powers (that he cant use too much or his brain will melt. fun!) this isnt relevant until the arc AFTER zim’s, where they end up poking around a historical site due to myni’s interest in that kind of thing, and they find logs of an old revolution (that was actually pretty successful in their goal, before they were caught and executed,) that lead them to a man named lefy. he helps with revolutions and helped these guys, and the trio go to seek him out; myni because he wants to impress his parents with helping them, pip because after they’ve recovered enough to walk around and do stuff, feel like they need to justify the choice to save their life and make their dad proud and all that, elly because he doesnt want pip to get hurt and die. And thats where the stuff REALLY starts happening and i cant tell u more sorry

this seemed kind of disjointed but thats bc i cant really be too detailed otherwise id like.... spoil it lmfao. but thats the summary of the first few arcs.

[theharellan]

THE POSITIVE & NEGATIVE; Mun & Muse - Meme.

fill out & repost ♥ This meme definitely favors canons more, but I hope OC’s still can make it somehow work with their own lore, and lil’ fandom of friends & mutuals. Multi-Muses pick the muse you are the most invested in atm. tagged by: stolen from @dansiere tagging: @ghiassan, @deathsreflection, @altuspavus, @windrunnerrs (velanna), @hopewrought, @willbeshot, @seahaloed (iron bull), @asterfed​ (noctis), @ anyone who wants to steal it! also multis feel free to choose a different character

My muse is:   canon / oc / au / canon-divergent / fandomless / complicated (i’m open to roleplaying with non-dragon age characters, and have AUs for other fandoms)

Is your character popular in the fandom? YES / NO. solas is both wildly popular and wildly hated. he’s been more consistently popular than the controversial women in the series, like sera or vivienne, who have only recently begun to get to the point where their tags are less vitriolic (although i’m sure it’s still out there), but there’s still a sizable hatedom that can’t have his name breathed in their vicinity w/o them talking abt how much they hate him. even if you’re currently cosplaying him!

Is your character considered hot™ in the fandom?  YES / NO / IDK. again, you have ppl who are super into him and ppl who think he’s ugly. my personal opinion is that i think he’s weirdly pretty, and wish ppl would commit more to his unconventional features rather than try to chisel him into sb more traditionally attractive and that ppl who don’t find him attractive would maybe chill w/ calling him ugly. find him unattractive by all means, but lets embrace the fact that inquisition let their love interests have skin flaws etc and accept that some won’t be our cups of tea.

Is your character considered strong in the fandom?  YES / NO / IDK. its hard to deny at this point tbh.

Are they underrated?  YES / NO / IDK. frustrating as the hate in the tags he has enough fans that i couldnt say he’s underrated w/ a straight face.

Were they relevant for the main story?  YES / NO. he’s the reason the game starts with a bang and not the inevitable dissolution of the conclave b/c the sides are disparate.

Were they relevant for the main character? YES / NO / THEY’RE THE PROTAG. regardless of solas’ relationship with the inquisitor, there are parallels and contrasts in their stories and he also is the reason they survive inquisition.

Are they widely known in their world? YES / NO. fen’harel is well-known and revered, if feared, among the dalish, yet at the same time he’s not remembered for a lot besides locking the gods away-- and the context of that decision has also been lost. as solas he’s relatively unknown until inquisition and especially trespasser.

How’s their reputation?  GOOD / BAD / NEUTRAL. again, polarising!! he has loyal agents and people are willing to speak well of him despite everything, including his enemies sometimes (depending mostly on the inquisitor). 

How strictly do you follow canon?  — generally i try to have a canon basis for my interpretation, even if i interpret the text differently than the author.

SELL YOUR MUSE! Aka try to list everything, which makes your muse interesting in your opinion to make them spicy for your mutuals.  —  solas is an immortal who is simultaneously jaded and very much invested in the small moments of life. far from being weary of the day-to-day lives of ordinary people, it is systems and orders he is most tired of. he walks an interesting line that feels far less misanthropic than other immortal characters i’ve experienced, yet still he’s quite cynical. as a character who has fought against religious based tyranny before, but in a completely different era, he is in a unique position where what he sees around him is both horrifyingly familiar and yet completely new. it allows an exploration of the wrongs of thedas’ society from an outsider’s perspective. his motivations are complex and multifaceted, often condemnable and yet also understandable. his character arc in inquisition (if befriended, or regardless in the case of my solas) takes him from a dispassionate, disconnected antagonist to someone deeply invested in the people of thedas, deeply conflicted and actively hoping he will be proven wrong again. i think his story is a testament to human (or elven, or dwarven, or-) connection and how even when we resist we can’t resist creating bonds with the people in our lives. i personally see this bond going beyond the inquisitor hence why i play low-approval solas as conflicted as high-approval, if not when it comes to the inquisitor.

Now the OPPOSITE, list everything why your muse could not be so interesting (even if you may not agree, what does the fandom perhaps think?).  —  solas is selfish and motivated solely by revenge, he’s clinging to a past that clearly no longer exists, if you ignore all the people from it who are still alive. he’s totally unaware of all his flaws and never owns up to any mistakes ever. no, i haven’t listened to a single word solas has said in my life why do you ask. he’s also critical of my faves which means he’s #cancelled, there is clearly no validity to what he’s saying. ksjdf no but in all seriousness i think a lot of reasons ppl don’t find solas interesting are just... weird readings of his character that sometimes have no basis in the text of inquisition, but also there are plenty of perfectly valid reasons to not find him interesting. usually those ppl don’t like... talk abt how much they don’t find him interesting constantly tho. they just chill and aren’t invested in this particular villain. for one thing i think the game missed out on opportunities for exploring how someone who may not have even had a body at the beginning of his existence would feel about gender and sexuality, so making him presumably straight and cis was a boring choice. i also think that the dragon age games being very protagonist-centric hurts solas’ character, there’s no real reason why the inquisitor is the only one who can throw his plans into question but making the player the center of the universe means he’s not allowed to change due to the effects of other companions or NPCs. thank god this is rp and i do what i want.

What inspired you to rp your muse?  —  i have a history degree so when the inquisition companions were being teased, solas describing bias in primary sources from the memories he’s seen got me interested in him. but my first playthrough i didn’t actually take him with me all too often, i think my main party was dorian-blackwall-varric. i liked him, and i think he or dorian were my first friends in skyhold, but my initial interest was in other characters. between his dialogue that appealed to the historian in me tho and how his spirit opinions sort of turned everything i’d felt about spirits in the last two games on its head, i started vibing with him more the farther i went in. like merrill set me up for the “spirits are people” thing and solas hit it out of the park. then temple of mythal happened, and i did bring solas with me there. i found his dialogue fascinating and also suspicious, i’d just finished masked empire like the day before da:i came out so i definitely thought solas was an ancient elf in the same vein as felassan. it was after temple of mythal that i actually decided to make his blog, although like as one idk linchpin to cement my status as solas trash... i was hit BAD by the banter bug on my first playthrough, probably got like a dozen banters total. but then at some point late in the game i took solas to the forbidden oasis and he wouldn’t stop talking to people, and i really loved his banter with the rest of my party at the time.

What keeps your inspiration going?  —  replaying inquisition, new DA content when the bioware gods deign to grant us a lifeline, but the biggest thing is my rp partners. i wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the people i write with, new and old. my activity of late hasn’t been the best, work and the summer heat has really been sapping me of energy, and does even during years when we aren’t going through a pandemic. but it’s the thought of my rp partners and love of solas that keeps me coming back.

Some more personal questions for the mun.

Give your mutuals some insight about the way you are in some matters, which could lead them to get more comfortable with you or perhaps not.

Do you think you give your character justice?  YES / NO / I SINCERELY HOPE I DO? i have my doubts sometimes, but i think i do ok.

Do you frequently write headcanons?  YES / NO / SORT OF? there is no headcanon too small for me.

Do you sometimes write drabbles?  YES / NO. but not lately * gestures to the low activity * i’ve been in this cycle where i get anxious abt late replies, so prioritise them, then burn myself out and can’t write the fics i want. i’ve had two i’ve been DYING to write tho i just... need to find the space in my brain to let myself.

Do you think a lot about your Muse during the day? YES / NO. i mean it depends on the day. if i work closing shifts at my store it gets very quiet and boring around 8:30 so i spent the next 90 minutes thinking about character stuff.

Are you confident in your portrayal?  YES / NO / SORT OF? 

Are you confident in your writing?  YES / NO / SOMETIMES. 

Are you a sensitive person?  YES / NO / SORTA.

Do you accept criticism well about your portrayal?  —  i’m going to say ‘no’ because like, i don���t ask for criticism. this is a hobby based on my interpretation of a character, if you think i write solas too soft then you’re welcome to think that, but i’m happy with the balance i’ve struck with his internal versus external behaviour and how he changes based upon who he’s speaking to. if you think i’m erasing straight people by making solas pan then ksjdfs. ok.

Do you like questions, which help you explore your character?  —  yes!!! even if they retread ground already trodden, a) my interpretation may have adjusted since the last time i played or b) a reminder is nice. if it’s new stuff then it’s fun to think about.

If someone disagrees to a headcanon of yours, do you want to know why?  —  it’d depend on why they disagree. if they just disagree on a subjective opinion about what i took from a certain line, then they’re welcome to their opinion but i don’t necessarily care to hear it. if it is unintentionally hurtful then i would like to know. although rather than a comment i’d rather a non-anonymous message.

If someone disagrees with your portrayal, how would you take it?  —  same as the above.

If someone really hates your character, how do you take it?  —  if they’re vocal about it i typically just unfollow / softblock if i was following in the first place. people can feel how they want about solas, but i’ve found over the years that if people really hate solas ooc it can often bleed into their ic interactions. it’s really weird seeing your character being brought up repeatedly in threads with others specifically to dunk on, for no reason other than i guess solas is living rent free in their heads, so at least we have that in common. but anyway unfollowing is just the best choice to avoid getting kinda pressed if i’m having a bad day.

Are you okay with people pointing out your grammatical errors?  —  roleplay is the wild west of writing, so i think it’d depend on what the error was. coming at me like “you shouldn’t start a sentence with a preposition” would get a laugh, but i don’t edit my replies much if at all and mistakes will 100% happen. pointing out typos is chill so long as you do it politely.

Do you think you are easy going as a mun?   —  it depends! i’ve learned that being too easy going actually just means i’m subjecting myself to negative emotions to please people. so i’ve gotten less easy going as the years go by. how does one define “easy going” anyway? does asking that question mean i am objectively not easy going? the longer this thought goes on the more the answer seems to be “probably not,” but i like to think it could be a lot worse.

[internationalspacehobo]

okay i was gonna do this yesterday but here’s a list of the non-pre-revisionist  (post-revisionist? revised?) MTG novels

==Artifacts==

The Artifacts novels revolve around Urza, one of the most emblematic characters from the entire Magic setting. There’s older novels but this is where the story as we know it today really started. Even if you only got into mtg as recently as Dominaria, some of those elements appeared here for the first time. Jhoira, Karn, and Teferi are all introduced here.

In terms of the game; these novels vaguely correspond to about a dozen sets: Antiquities, the Dark, Fallen Empires, Mirage, Weatherlight, Visions, Tempest, Stronghold, Exodus, Urza’s Saga, Urza’s Legacy, and Urza’s Destiny.

The Brother's War (1998)

Planeswalker (1998)

Time Stream (1999)

Bloodlines (1999)

==Ice Age==

What happens when you blow up the world with a magic nuke? You get millenia of frost covering your entire planet. If you’re curious about who that apparently ancient wizard that Jhoira talked to during Dominaria was, or how Jaya Ballard might have been when she was Chandra’s age, this is the cycle you’re looking for.

The Gathering Dark (1999)

The Eternal Ice (2000)

The Shattered Alliance (2000)

The resolution to this block was released six years later, for the small set Coldsnap (the one I started playing with!). I’ve archived it as best as I could [here].

==Masquerade==

These books revolve (mostly) around Gerrard Capashen (the result of Urza’s generations-long eugenics project), and the crew of the Weatherlight (notice how much of this stuff shows up in Dominaria?).

It also marks the start of magic getting one story per non-core set! Which they kept up all the way until Lorwyn / Shadowmoor*; almost always naming the novels after the set they correspond to (with some exceptions).

Rath and Storm (1998) (Not technically part of the cycle anymore, but was originally the first book of the story. Wizards just like to shift shit around)

Mercadian Masques (1999)

Nemesis (2000)

Prophecy (2000)

*aside from Legends, which has always done its own thing

==Invasion==

Invasion closes up the Weatherlight storyline, with the Phyrexian invasion of Dominaria. 

The Thran (1999) is not part of any of the cycles (published originally as a prequel to the invasion cycle, then later re-published as the last bit of the artifacts cycle), since it takes place thousands of years before the very beginning of the story.

Invasion (2000)

Planeshift (2001)

Apocalypse (2001)

==Odyssey==

The Urza / Weatherlight saga is over! 21 sets, 15 novels, 7 years, and a shit ton of cards later, we get to discover a whole buncha new characters. Not gonna lie, I have never read up on the story of professional Beefy Boy Kamahl. I know it sets up the Cabal (eh? eh? sound familiar?) and the Mirari, and gets a couple shout outs in cards in Dominaria, but I’m lost beyond that.

Odyssey (2000)

Chainer's Torment (2001)

Judgement (2001)

==Onslaught==

The continuation of the Odyssey cycle! Kamahl does some stuff, his sister fuses with an angel and I think someone else as well and becomes an almost god? Or something? Magic got wild for a while, I’m not gonna lie.

Onslaught (2002)

Legions (2003)

Scourge (2003)

==Legends==

Hey how about some unrelated characters? We all love legendary cards right? Do you like furries? If you answered “uh... i guess?” to all of these then boy is the first Legends cycle for you!

Johan (2001)

Jedit (2001)

Hazezon (2002)

Man, sure seems like nothing relevant to the modern story has happened in a while, huh? We got to follow good ole’ Jedit Ojannen do his thing for a bit. Man, and that was only the first half. The second one probably isn’t any better, huh? Apparently the bad guy is named “Nicol Bolas”? Who came up with THAT name, huh? Doesn’t sound like an intimidating and long running villain, if I’m gonna be honest. I doubt we’ll see him again.

Assassin's Blade (2002)

Emperor's Fist (2003)

Champion's Trial (2003)

==Mirrodin==

*notices your new focus on exploring worlds beyond dominaria* OwO what’s this?

The Mirrodin block marks the beginning of the Modern format, and a new focus on exploring new worlds instead of just tangientially mentioning them in relation to Dominaria! It still continues with the publishing format of one book per non-core set but we finally get to what I think attracts most people to the lore: the exploration of other worlds, with their own stories, characters, and even fundamental laws of physics.

The Mirrodin set revolves around the completely metallic plane of Argentum, created by our old buddy Karn (you might remember him from the very beginning; or the Dominaria storyline, if you’re working your way backwards), and what wild shit happens there during his absence.

The Moons of Mirrodin (2003)

The Darksteel Eye (2004)

The Fifth Dawn (2004)

==Kamigawa==

What an incredible setting, and what a let down of mechanics. Kamigawa is actually formed of two worlds: the material world and the world of spirits (or kami, as they’re called here). When a spirit is kidnapped by the humans, O-Kagachi, lord of all things, declares a war to take back That Which Was Taken.

Kamigawa was (until the Dominaria set) the only set that had legendary creatures at uncommon! They came up with a bunch of wild stuff, like ”arcane” spells, which are a sort of proto-tribal mechanic, and cards you could flip around to become different cards. This was before I started playing so I couldn’t tell you how it played at the time; but apparently it was a commercial failure. Here’s hoping we get to revisit it someday (maybe with Tamiyo?).

Outlaw: Champions of Kamigawa (2004)

Heretic: Betrayers of Kamigawa (2005)

Guardian: Saviors of Kamigawa (2005)

==Ravnica==

The original introduction of the most popular plane in the history of magic: the gathering!! If you’re even vaguely interested in the story of the game you know what Ravnica is; so I’ll just leave it at: Cop Mystery Drama Set on Ravnica. Also: the Guildpact, when it was an all encompassing legal-magic-spell, and not a skinny nerd in a blue cloak.

Ravnica: City of Guilds (2005)

Guildpact (2006)

Dissension (2006)

==Time Spiral==

After 3 years of planeswalking, covering 3 blocks of 3 sets each, we finally make it back to Dominaria (the plane)! Modern Horizons before Modern Horizons; Dominaria (the set) before Dominaria (the set). Glimpses of the past, an alternative reality where everything is just slightly shifted, and visions of what the future might hold.

Time Spiral (2006)

Planar Chaos (2007)

Future Sight (2007)

==Lorwyn / Shadowmoor==

Fairy tales, a self contained story that doesn’t require any previous knowledge of the lore, and also isn’t required reading to understand any of the later stuff. What more do you want?

Llorwyn (2007)

Morningtide (2008)

Shadowmoor (2008)

Eventide (2008)

[rivenroad]

Splitting this into two posts for clarity!

Send 👘 to see them in an outfit traditional to their culture

Traditional Garlean clothing is something I’ve thought about a lot. The only Garlean fashion we really see in-game is military gear, or heavily influenced by their conquered territories such as Doma. However, I suspect that the models used for the gear that drops in Castrum Abania and some other dungeons, under different names, is linked to the Empire, partly due to the dungeon being a castrum and also because some of it is called “Farlander” which seems to me like it could refer to Ilsabard, though I could be wrong there. Unfortunately I don’t have any of that gear yet, though this set feels somewhat visually similar to me:

Considering how far north it is, before their technological advances, people from Garlemald and its surrounding area in Ilsabard likely had a lot in common with Arctic indigenous people in the real world, so I’d imagine is that warm clothing made from pelts/fur is probably quite common. That sort of thing is probably what’s most in line with what could be considered “traditional” in Garlemald. I think the closest thing we have in-game to that right now is the Highland/Glacial gear, which is likely Coerthan/Ishgardian but close enough. Cassius wouldn’t be caught dead in a smock but here’s the coat:

Otherwise, the Allagan Empire has obviously had a huge impact on the Garlean Empire in terms of technology, but this undoubtedly extends to other areas too. I wouldn’t be surprised if that included clothing. This High Allagan coat does bear some similarities to the armour we see on higher-ranking Garleans. I’ve generally taken to dressing Cassius in Allagan armour partly due to his personal interest, but also because the style and colour scheme seems pretty similar to Garlean stuff in general. The two are pretty closely linked. So whilst I think this is less on the “traditional” side it’s still pretty relevant.

I’m really hoping future expansions will see us head to Ilsabard and dump all the lore of Garlean life on us because I am EXTREMELY ready for that and have been for years.

[moonlight-at-dawn]

About the Astrals

...and How Much (read: Little) They Could Really Do, And What They Gave To Do It

Okay, this started as me being pissy over all the “The Astrals are so cruel” “Bahamut is such an asshole” “It’s not fair that they made him do this they could’ve just fixed it themselves” kinds of posts. And then debating with that. And then realizing how long this was getting, and so here we are, it gets its own post.

It’s formatted a bit awkwardly and I am entirely too lazy to make this a pretty post so I’m sorry for my rambling.

And now here’s the stuff~

-Gods tend to have some rules to follow about levels of interference and also the amount of responsibility that the people have to see to their own survival and such. (i.e. the Gods give Humanity the tools but humans gotta do the work)

-There’s also the fact that the Starscourge came from Outer Space and thus could have been outside of their ability to affect, since it wasn’t of Eos.

The second one explains itself I think, so it’s only the first I’ll expand on.

Out of the Astrals, this is what we have to work with us against the Starscourge:

1. Ifrit, the Betrayer. He’s dead and he wouldn’t help anyways since he caused it.

2. Bahamut. Gifted the Oracle with the Trident and magic to cleanse the Starscourge. Gifted the Kings of Lucis with the Crystal, the Ring, and his very own magic, all tools to be used to see to the ending of the Starscourge. He then seems to disappear from Eos (?) and is seen only in the Crystal and then outside of it again only after bonding with Noct, indicating he was within the Crystal the entire time, and unable to do anything outside of it.

3. Titan. He is a little bit trapped under the meteor unfortunately, and it seems only his death is able to clear out the meteor itself and free him, as seen when Noct (and the Empire...) defeats him. So the fact that he’s trapped under the meteor for ~2000 and unable to ever free himself or be freed by the others is probably the most powerful proof of the Astrals’ inability to deal with the Starscourge on their own.

4. Ramuh. .....I hate that we know nothing about Ramuh tbh lol he’s a dead spot. Could be alive, could be dead, could be recently dead, could be 30 years dead, could be thousands of years dead. Who knows, maybe he died way back, maybe Ifrit killed him, or maybe he was just on an intergalactic roadtrip for the last 2000+ years. We don’t know, anything’s possible~! He might like humans, he might hate them, he might not give a crap lol

5. Shiva. She certainly appears to have a fondness for humans. It’s interesting that the Cosmogony supposedly tells of the 24 Messengers, meaning that Gentiana is truly a Messenger or else they would have known she wasn’t who she said she was immediately. So, is Gentiana always Shiva, or did she take her form? (...did someone translate her blurb from the Ultimania guide? does it clear any of this up? the JP is way too complicated for me x_x)

6. Leviathan. Not particularly kindhearted towards humans. Doesn’t necessarily want them all dead the same way Ifrit does, but has no attachment to them and would not likely directly help the other Astrals in removing the Starscourge. She would demand humanity work for and earn her help, so if the other 2~3 were unable to remove the Starscourge with just their power but could have with hers, then that’s just too bad so sad, time for plan B I guess.

So!! Before the crystal and oracles and everything, there were at best 3 Astrals who could deal with the Starscourge, since Leviathan hates humanity, Titan was trapped, and then of course Ifrit was never on this list.

The fact that Titan was trapped by the meteor and they all apparently could do nothing to help him out shows us that they probably didn’t have the power to take care of the Starscourge by themselves anyways.

I believe it was said somewhere that the Crystal was part of the stuff that came from outer space???? I cannot remember and I might be mixing my series’ lores, but I’m mentioning it in case it rings a bell to anyone and if there’s a source if I did remember that right. (ETA: I’m mixing up my lore on this one, disregard lol)

Now on to how the Astrals DID help us~!

There’s a finite number of these Astrals. There’s the Six. That’s it, they’re all we got. But humans...! We propagate our species, but we have relatively short lifespans and a very small amount of magical/life energy in comparison with the Astrals.

So Bahamut gave his weapon, his trident to the Humans, managed a way to give them a magic to purify the Starscourge from each other, and a way to provide protections for settlements, so that they could survive.

And then he gave his magic to humanity, and he gave humanity this crystal which could be used to help protect them, and which would gather the power to eradicate the Starscourge from Eos.

The Omen trailer tells us about the power gathering part, in its way. The Crystal tells Regis that it has seen many deaths but only needs one more, then it can rest. That’s the indication. It’s finally at the point to move on to the next step, but it still needs Noct’s death to see it done.

The point here is that the sacrifices were never personal. People say the Astrals toyed with the humans, but they never once did. Well, not in regards to stuff done to get rid of the Starscourge. I don’t know what they were like back in the days when they seemed to interact with humanity a lot more. (Am I the only one who got that impression? That the Astrals were a lot more active in the lives of humans, until the Astral War?)

And now we get to what did the Astrals sacrifice for humanity - Since they asked that lives be sacrificed to power this, it’s only right that they sacrificed, too, right?

Well, let’s not forget how every single Astral dies for Noct lol

I think this got missed by a lot of people, but yes, the Astrals did die.

Well, I can confirm Shiva, Titan, and Leviathan.

-I assume Bahamut died in giving his power and going into the Crystal, based on some other bits I’ll get to in a moment.

-Ramuh, as I said above, we know nothing about, but him being dead in some way is likely because of what happens with the other three.

-Shiva died 11 years prior. Gigant Shiva (?) was rose up, attacked, and was ultimately defeated by the Empire a year after Tenebrae’s occupation. (I like to think Genti was pissed on Luna’s behalf, but that’s not relevant)

-Noct, the Chocobros, and the Empire do kill Titan at the Disc of Cauthess. The energy released from his death destroys the meteor.

-Leviathan is killed in Altissia and it’s when she dies and her water vortex collapses into a tidal wave that Luna summons Titan to create a breakwater to protect the rest of the city from being destroyed.

(there are news headlines and radio news clips about these things so the proof on most of them is right in the game for you to find~)

Now to why I assume Bahamut and Ramuh are also dead, considering everyone else - That seems to be part of the price of giving their power to humans.

And that’s also why they require such a heavy price from humans.

But each of them are able to be summoned after giving their favor to Noct, so they clearly all have some ability in their deaths. But it doesn’t seem as though they have full ability, y’know? They aren’t really alive anymore, they’re just their soul and no longer their body? I’m not really sure how to describe, just that they are very clearly less than they were before in order to aid humans.

So they sacrificed every bit as much as they asked be sacrificed.

They only made humanity pay the price that was necessary to get the job done.

They needed humanity’s help to overcome the Starscourge. And they didn’t ask for an ounce more than they needed.

[diagrapher]

Differences I know of so far between Exalted editions

So, recently I told Ununnilium about the main differences between Exalted editions that I could think of, and I figured I should list them here too.

General:

So far, 3rd edition has a lot less content than the first two editions since it’s only new. Thus, for example, it only has rules for playing one type of Exalted so far.


Mechanical:

1st edition’s combat system was broken, 2nd edition’s combat system was horribly broken until it got a whole book of erata, 3rd edition’s combat system seems to be OK so far.

Each successive edition has less restrictions on what a PC’s personality can be like- 1st gives a list of "natures” defining how they behave (e.g. you could choose to have your character a “traditionalist” or a “thrillseeker”, but not both”, a fixed number of things characters get to care deeply about and a number of dots to distribute between compassion, conviction, temperance and valor. 2nd gets rid of the "natures”. 3rd gets rid of the four virtues and lets characters care deeply about as many things as you like, but on the other hand requires that characters deeply hate at least one thing.


1st edition has no social influence system beyond it’s general handling-difficult-tasks system. 2nd edition has a horrible social influence system in which everything has an unnecessarily flavorless name and peoples’ deepest commitments reputedly tend to only effect social influence slightly even when they’re relevant. 3rd edition has a pretty good social influence system.

1st edition has no crafting system beyond it’s general handling-difficult-tasks system. 2nd edition has a simple but workable crafting system. 3rd edition has a horribly overcomplicated crafting system with six different abstract resources, three of which have competely flavorless names, and has the potential to create situations where someone is unable to make something they need to for reasons which don’t make much sense.

2nd edition combines martial arts and “brawl” (i.e. self-taught unarmed combat) into a single ability, combines “endurance” (tolerating long periods of cold, thirst etc.) and “resistance” (tolerating injury, poison etc.) into a single ability, and adds “war” (i.e. military command) as an ability. 3rd edition splits brawl and martial arts again but otherwise keeps the same abilities as 2nd edition.


3rd edition fixes a problem previous editions had where raising your essence rating required saving a ridiculously huge amount of XP, which meant a long period refraining for cool shorter-term character advancement options. It also has PCs start the game at Essence 1 rather than Essence 2, which avoids quite a bit of confusion

3rd edition removes the rules for most sorts of non-sorcerous traditional magic like astrology, although some of them still exist in-setting.

3rd edition removes the rules for how having a teacher changes training times, instead just saying the GM should decide how much it improves them.


Something pretty interesting which I forgot to tell Ununnilium; 3rd edition adds a system to encourage non-GM players to join the GM in introducing setting details if they’re details their characters would know.

Setting:

In 1e, Luna would only be a somewhat powerful god if not for her Primordial girlfriend Gaia. In 2e, Luna was created already one of the most powerful gods, while Gaia has mostly left Creation into the depths of the Wyld, only leaving behind a relatively weak avatar to keep her girlfriend Luna company, tend her garden and so forth. In 3e, Gaia left the world entirely after the Primordial War and is implied to have broken up with Luna (who is still one of the most powerful gods) when she did so, possibly because of what was done to her family after the war or possibly for other reasons.

In 1e, the underworld is a dim, barren reflection of Creation in which ghosts have a similar multidude of social structures to the living, among them the twelve kingdoms of the Deathlords. In 2e, it is a dim, barren reflection of Creation which (apart from a few well-defended or low-value areas) has been conquered by the twelve empires of the Deathlords. In 3e, it is a vast expanse of islands separated by rivers. The Deathlords rule parts of it, but its not yet clear how much.

In 2e, the city of Sijan has been a city of tombs and funerals since time immemorial. In 3e, it’s only been so since the Great Contagion, when its people set up a program to retrieve and provide funeral for those victims of the contagion who would otherwise have gone without funerals.

2e’s later expansions had a lot of information about obscure-in-universe lore like the details of life in the first age which is absent in 1e and so far in 3e.

Both:

1e has the Terrestrial, Solar, Lunar Siderial, Abyssal and Alchemical exalted. 2e adds Infernals. 3e is adding Liminals, Exigents and Getimians.

1e lunars are violent brutes. 2e lunars are sneaky, iconoclastic, loyal beings who reshape  societies from the shadows while protecting them from outside threats. We don’t know much about 3e lunars yet but we know that whereas 2e ones controlled some of the “barbarian” societies secretly, 3e ones rule them openly.

The details of the charm trees are different in each edition. 3e charms tend to have weird inelegant mechanical complications like using just about every possible mechanical representation of “you’re slightly better at this thing represented as a dice roll” or dropping in cost from 7m to 6m when you go from Essence 2 to Essence 3. I might go into more detail about charm tree diferences in a later post, but I’d need to look at them in more detail first.

In 3e there are people in Creation- called “Thaumaturges”- with strange minor inborn magical talents such as the ability to light fires which will repel rain or to read tea-leaves accurately.

Sorcery:

In 1e and 2e, to learn sorcery without being a Primordial one must pass through five stations- instruction in sorcery, giving up something important to you, and three other relatively minor stations. Most mortals (God-Blooded, Exalted or most supernatural beings) must additionally gain the ability to perceive and manipulate essence through one of a number of methods, including: a certain type of transformative experience in the Wyld, a blessing from a spirit or Celestial Exalt who knows an appropriate charm, certain ascetic practices, a dangerous occult ritual in a demesne or certain dangerous drugs.

In 3e, the only requirement to learn sorcery- whether for a mortal or an Exalt- is to gain the ability to perceive and manipulate the essence of the world in the appropriate way, which both mortals and exalts can do through a transformative experience in the Wyld, a blessing from a spirit (but Celestial Exalts aren’t mentioned there), a combination of asceticism and alchemical self-modification, or other methods not described in the rules. Further, in 3e, the way in which a sorcerer shapes essence for a spell is determined by how they gained the power to do it- for example, someone granted that power by a fire elemental might need to burn stuff to cast spells.

Martial Arts

In 1e and 2e, martial arts are divided into four types: natural martial arts (which don’t involve charms and can be learned by anyone), Terrestrial supernatural martial arts (which involve learning special martial arts charms and can be learned by anyone who can perceive and manipulate essence, but for which mortal essence-manipulators require especially skilled teachers), Celestial martial arts (which also involve charms and require a style of essence perception and manipulation which is impossible for mortals, which comes naturally to Celestial Exalted, and which Terrestrial Exalted can develop through an onerous ten-year training process, but for which Terrestrial Exalted still need especially skilled teachers) and Siderial martial arts (which tend to be much more obviously-supernatural than other martial arts and which can be learned by Solar-tier and Siderial Exalted who have already mastered a Celestial Martial Art, but for which non-Siderials need especially skilled Siderial teachers).

In 3e, there are only regular and Siderial martial arts, with non-Siderial martial arts being learnable by anyone, but providing charms to Exalted and only Exalted practitioners, with the charms having a less-powerful form usable by any Exalt, a more powerful form usable by any Lunar Exalted and by Terrestrial Exalted who have gone through an arduous training process, and a still more powerful form usable by Solar-tier and Siderial Exalted.


Solar Anima Powers:

3e changes the Solar anima powers

Dawns’ ability to get supernaturally scary, Zeniths’ bonus against the undead and Eclipses’ oath-sanctifying power all get sneakier- Dawns go from “become huge, glowing, and extremely scary” to “just get really scary for reasons people probably couldn’t explain”, Zeniths no longer glow when they use their bonus against undead and Eclipses’ power goes from “if everyone involved agrees to it, you may have glowing writing appear and a deal be enchanted so that those who break it suffer misforture” to “if anyone makes a deal in your presence, you may enchant it so that those who break it suffer misfortune, and if you wish you may also make glowing writing appear to show that you’ve done so.

Dawns now also get general combat bonuses. When zeniths use their anima power to cremate corpses, they now sense some of the intimacies of the dead and may pass those feelings on to the people they were for. Zeniths may also now compel gods to materialize. Twilights may now vanish until sunset over several round of combat to escape attackers, and may now bind familiars as an anima power. Nights just get some minor mechanical tweaks.

Eclipses can now learn spirit and fair folk charms as easily as they can Solar ones given an appropriate teacher, but can no longer learn the charms of non-Solar exalted at all.

[askthegreenguys]

Tagged by: @bonkakira-and-friends technically

rules: answer the questions and tag 20 blogs you want to get to know better (I’m a loser I don’t know 20 people)

name: Ariel/Nasa family name: can we just delete this that’s like basic internet safety shit star sign: Taurus height: 5′4″ age: 25 (I’m old) fave Color: Blue time rn: 10:53 am hours of sleep: since BotW came out, not nearly enough hahahaha

lucky number: don’t have one? last thing i googled: Mohs Hardness Scale. I’m a grade A nerd. Dunno why I bothered I remembered all the relevant stuff anyways. I think I wanted to see if there were any minerals that could pass as quartz that were harder than it that were likely to be sold as fake quartz crystals.  fave fictional character: Ha. Too long of a list.  blankets i sleep with: 4 counting the sheet in the winter. 0-2 during the summer

favorite artists: Dunno. @ferisae is def my favorite Tumblr artist though. Art goals, man. dream trip:  Anywhere there’s something interesting geology wise. Hawaii is near the top though. dream job: Park Ranger, although every now and again I want to be an Astronaut again. Wouldn’t go over well though, I’ve learned I don’t do so well in isolation what are you wearing right now: work uniform follower count: 50!!!!! *throws confetti* I’d do a 50-follower-special thing but I’m already doing a special thing next month so sorry @kitterahsdollhouse posts: 768 what do you post about: RPs, asks, art and stories, and occasionally fourth wall breaking commentary on zelda games and nintendo news most active followers: idk man when did your blog reach its peak: what’s a peak why did you make this blog: to develop the boys as characters so that once they appear in the comic it won’t be a trainwreck do you get asks on a daily basis: nope. I tend to hoard asks over a few month’s period and answer them all at once why did you choose your url: I wanted something that could encompass all of the boys and somehow this wasn’t taken countries you’ve lived in:USA

favorite fandom: Eh idk. I will talk about theories and lore and characters and such at length for LoZ, Sailor Moon, and Miraculous Ladybug, but I don’t really jump into the actual fandom spaces so much. I inhabit a quiet little corner filled with reasonable people and look at pretty arts and read fanfic, and really only engage in discussion with individuals I trust not to go crazy about shit. languages you speak: Just English, although I really should work on my Spanish. The fact that it’s so terrible is pretty lousy considering where I live and how often I need it favorite film: ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE. I CANNOT STRESS HOW MUCH I LOVE THIS MOVIE. last article you read: don’t remember, probably something space or physics related last thing you bought online: does preordering BotW count?

last person you dreamt of: I don’t remember a recurring dream: something with a wizard turning everyone into spaghetti <-- Susumu that is amazing. I’ve had a dream (not recently) where I was an Egyptian princess, who was also a whale, swimming through the golden waters of Egypt at least 3 times. Unfortunately that was when I was pretty little and my dreams haven’t been nearly that entertaining in years. fears: the sensation of falling freaks me the heck out, also volcanoes (they’re awesome but they’re also terrifying) how would your friends describe you: Idk ask my friends. Peeps how would you describe me? if you had $$$ to spend what would you buy first: A new engine for my car shuffle your song library and list the first three songs that play: Something to Hide- Journey Confronting Ganondorf- TP soundtrack Windfall Island- WW soundtrack tagging: @alinkbetweenportraits @askthefwrp @askthegreenknight @it-takes-three