#the narration style or verbiage choices or something and was like ''I like my own sometimes too. LIKE THE MARKINGS''

[beyondthetemples-ooc]

It just turned xmas eve and I'm sitting here grinning like a lunatic at how I described Dove's transformation into demon!Dove, specifically because I really like what I headcanon'd about the letters!

In the climax battle scene of DDD, I gave Dove the same runes that Raven glows with in s4, except I Elaborated. I gave them Purpose besides just Look Cool and Ancient. Excerpt below (DDD, ch20).

--

And when the merging was complete, Raven couldn’t believe what she saw.

What had he done to her?

She lifted herself from the dust and stood with a stance so powerful, so confident that Raven couldn’t believe it was DOVE under that cloak. The newborn demon stretched, flexing, gathering and astrally caressed the currents of energy – Suddenly she threw the scorched cloak away and revealed an outfit that swept across her curves, skirting her back and shoulders, so provocative it was barely even there; its pieces embraced at her cocked hip and accentuated her battle-ready stance.

So little of that crimson and leathery flesh was hidden, the real Dove would have fled under the covers from embarrassment. But more importantly, more frighteningly, this utterly uncharacteristic outfit revealed messages sewn into her skin like astral battlescars:

Dove was marked with dark scrawls of energy, the epistles burning in activation, scripts to keep his power in her body, runes to channel evil energies ripped from the very cosmos, letters as old as the chaos they channeled were strewn across every inch of her exposed flesh. Warnings on her arm. Triumph flooded down her back. Terms of surrender splashed across her collarbone and met at the four cauterized scars on her chest.

Trigon was gone, sealed within her by the sigil of damnation, and the magic now thriving within her was clamoring for violence - delirious to be unleashed, even as embers of the fading hellfire still lit her skin.

And here was the perfect target.

Dove’s senses, human and preternaturally enhanced, all detected Raven’s presence. She sensed the signs of heightened emotion: Raven’s calm mask was strained. She saw the subtle tension in her shoulders, heard her heart pounding a heavier rhythm than it had a moment ago. She felt the slightest shift of blood flow as Raven’s muscles tensed, preparing for battle at her instinct’s call, and she could feel the air strung tight around her as Raven's powers raged within her, the trained instinct to eliminate the threat, warring with the protectress instinct to not hurt her little sister.

And most satisfying of all, her telepath mind tasted Raven’s fear, an absolute delicacy whether the fear was for herself or her lost sister’s soul.

[vase]

Writing Tip #2: Getting Started, Part Two - The Fourth Pillar

Hello again! I want to thank everyone for the phenomenal amount of support my last post received. I'm really hoping to keep this momentum up, and I'm very thankful that so many people are having as much fun as I am.

As always, it's time for our next venture into the wonderful world of writing. Last time, we discussed character, plot, and setting. Next, I'd like to delve into what I personally consider the fourth important pillar alongside these. This fourth pillar is prose!

In writing, prose is meant to describe the manner of which a writer writes. Think of it as the writer's own personal style. Prose is specific to what is literally on the page. Prose dictates specifically the word choice, sentence length variation, grammar choices, and diction of the author. While communities around this are virile, an author need not worry if their prose is strictly "good", rather that it is consistent and fitting.

Typically, when a person (mostly literature students, because no one else gives a shit about prose) refers to "good prose", they will refer to the works of classic authors like Austen or Melville. "Good prose" tends to be filed under the same vein of books that non-literature students complain about, the ones that harp on about descriptions of a tree for an hour. This prose is praised because it excels in imagery--these hour long tree descriptions use excessive verbiage to paint an excessively clear picture of the surroundings. Often, the word choice of the author is what lends it its praise. Our average author, again, need not worry. One does not need to harp on about a tree for an hour to be good at prose. It is better, instead, to be fitting.

[ ID: MOTHER died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday. ]

What precedes is an excerpt from Albert Camus's ever iconic 'The Stranger', in one of its many translations. While the original word choice is lost in translation (from dastardly French), the intent and prose of Camus is obediently transcribed by loyal translators. The main character of The Stranger, Meursault, is a man who thinks in a very objective and brisk sense. This bleeds into the prose of the book itself. Here, it would only kneecap Camus and The Stranger if the book indulged in the flowery, purple prose (term used to describe prose that is syrupy and poetic) of other notable classics, because it would go against the main character's worldview.

It's not necessarily important that your prose uses amazing words and the perfect Austenian writing, but rather that it matches the story. If your narrator character is a preteen girl, she's not going to describe things as 'Kafkaesque' (unless she's the coolest teen girl ever). Experimenting with prose is especially fun in multiple POV stories, with the possibility of different characters speaking or recounting things differently. Just as I recommended writing exercises previously when building characters, writing multiple POVs with different prose on purpose is a good way to build skill in prose. Everyone has their own specific 'prose', but developing your prose is an excellent idea, especially before writing the first draft of your project. Just like a drawing style, whereas everyone has their own style, it's better to learn to draw motion, backgrounds, and shadows before starting drawing your webcomic.

In a first person perspective novel, the prose of the book should be close to the way the narrator character speaks in dialogue, unless there's a specific reason otherwise (ie. the character is a spy and speaks differently to the people around them than they would regularly, or something along that vein). Multiple POV third person novels may also see a shift in prose depending on who is being followed, but they don't always need one. In fact, a dramatic shift may be a bit jarring for readers in these instances. Third person omniscient books need not a prose specific to the central character per se, but this brings in the topic of audience. A book with a story aimed at preteen audiences probably shouldn't use advanced prose, as it may be difficult for the preteen audiences to follow. A writer's prose, however, should be flexible enough to shift from genre-to-genre, reading level to reading level.

Don't believe me? Try it! A great way to practice prose, especially in this sense, would be to write the same general passage for different audiences: first as a children's book, then as a YA book, then as an adult book, and maybe even as an Austenian classic. A great way to practice prose and strengthen characters would be to write the same scene from many different character's perspectives, and incorporating the character's quirks into the prose. Personally, as well, I'm going to recommend writing poetry, especially rhyming poetry. Poetry challenges writers to use thinner perimeters to build word choice and intent.

Thanks everyone for reading once again! I know prose isn't a topic many find super interesting, and I'm sorry to disappoint those who were looking for a character writing or a worldbuilding tip. I promise, next time. Happy writing, prose apprentices, and thanks again for being along for the ride.

[seuzz]

Novel: Absalom, Absalom!

Summary In 1909 Quentin Compson of Jefferson, Mississippi, is summoned out to her house by Miss Rosa Coldfield to listen to the story of the Sutpen family, into which her sister married. Quentin later hears more of the story from his father, and he himself learns more directly on visiting the decaying Sutpen mansion with Miss Rosa. A year later he recounts the story to his roommate at Harvard, who speculates copiously on details not know and which were impossible to learn.

The story of Thomas Sutpen, when put together: The son of poor white trash in Virginia, Thomas Sutpen was as a youth insulted by a house slave and became determined to have an estate and dynasty of his own. He moved to Haiti where he married, and only too late discovered—after fathering a child by her—that his wife was part-Negro. He divorced her and moved with twenty slaves to Jefferson where he bamboozled his way into ownership of a hundred acres on which he built a great mansion. He wed Ellen Coldfield, the daughter of shopkeeper and by her fathered a daughter, Judith, and a son, Henry. He also fathered another daughter, Clytie, by a slave a girl. For all this, Sutpen never really attained respectability in the eyes of the town.

Henry Sutpen went to university where he befriended an older student, Charles Bon, and brought him back home, where it was arranged for Charles to marry Judith. Sutpen, however, realized that Charles was the son he had by his first wife; on informing Henry of this, Henry disowned his father and fled with Charles. They joined the Confederate Army on the outbreak of the War. When it was over they returned home, and at the gates of the house Henry killed Charles. It is assumed it was because Charles was determined to marry Judith despite being her half-brother and being part-Negro. Henry then ran off. Ellen Coldfield was already dead before this had happened.

Thomas Sutpen returned to his ruined plantation and tried to rebuild it. He proposed a kind of marriage to Rosa Coldfield, the much-younger sister of Ellen, who had moved in with Judith and Clytie. He proposed that he father a child by her, but only marry her if the child was a son. She naturally refused and moved back to town. Sutpen then fathered a child on the granddaughter of a squatter who lived on his land. When the child proved a girl, he disowned them both, and was promptly murdered by the squatter, who also killed his daughter and the infant before being killed by a posse.

Some years later a child that Charles had fathered on an octaroon is fetched from New Orleans by Clytie and Judith. He marries a black woman and fathers a child. Charles's son and Judith die of yellow fever, leaving Clytie and Charles's grandson the only inhabitants of the ruined house.

In 1909 Quentin and Rosa travel out to the mansion, where they discover Henry, living there four years, in an upper room waiting to die. Later, when they try to fetch him back to town, Clytie burns the house down, killing herself and Henry.

Notes At the time of its publication, Clifton Fadiman denounced Absalom, Absalom! as "a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks."

I think there is some justice in this judgment. I'm not alone, either. Even today, when it is a feature of university literature classes, this novel is controversial among critics. The plot is a Gothic horror story that is only slowly revealed in piecemeal fashion as various narrators take their turns sketching it and coloring it in with their own perspectives; and to grasp the prose style, imagine a kudzu that's been weaponized by Batman's Poison Ivy .

And yet this isn't to say that the novel is bad or and should be dismissed. It's quite good, actually, if only it is accepted as what it is and not wished to be what it is not.

But I'm not here to pass a critical judgment, only to remark on what works very well, what works less well, and what lessons might be learned. I have only two:

1. The novel does a masterful job of parceling out only a little information at a time, and parceling it out so that we sense the disclosures coming and are not shocked to our core when they arrive. This creates suspense and stops the plot twists being to nakedly shocking when they come, while still giving us a good chill when our fears are confirmed. It would work even if the prose style weren't as dense and obscure as it often is, and a reading of Absalom, Absalom! make plain how much sheer storytelling joy there is to be had in building and delaying plot developments not by manipulating the plot but by manipulating the narrative.

2. Most of the criticisms of the prose style concentrate on the length of the sentences, the complexity of their internal structure, and the insertion of parenthetical material. These stylistic choices can and have been defended, but the greatest defect (IMO) is the relative lack of vivid, concrete words, and the superabundance of words that only exist for the sake of other words.

Here is an example of what I mean:

... probably by that time he had learned that there were three things and no more: breathing, pleasure, darkness; and without money there could be no pleasure, and without pleasure it would not even be breathing but mere protoplasmic inhale and collapse of blind unorganism in a darkness where light never began.

The meaning, if you read it carefully, is clear enough: Pleasure needs money, and breathing needs pleasure; for breathing without pleasure is not life but only a biological mechanicalness. You may say that Faulkner's original is more stylish than my paraphrase, and I will not argue. But notice how every noun in Faulkner's passage (and my own) is either abstract (thing, breathing, pleasure, money, inhale, unorganism) or abstractness dressed in metaphor (darkness, light). "Learned" is not a vivid verb, and "collapse" is another metaphor for an abstraction. Every one of those fifty-one words is either abstract or merely a connective binding those abstractions together.  And so the imagination fumbles vainly for some real and vivid image in this wall of words.

Here is a passage where we do get something concrete when Faulkner describes Miss Rosa’s house:

... a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.

This is a challenge to read, but it is easier to absorb because there are definite objects—blinds and dust motes and flecks of paint; the sun, the room, the air—colored with vivid adjectives (dim hot airless; yellow; dead old dried); and even the parenthetical remarks about light and air carrying heat refer to real things.

When Faulkner writes in this latter, as he does throughout most of Chapter Nine, the reader can move swiftly and confidently through even the longest and most maze-like sentences, because the sentences gives us real things to imagine and ways of imagining them. But when he retreats into the abstract—which he is most often does—the story is swallowed up in mere verbiage.

You can defend even this aspect of Faulkner's style by arguing that, ultimately, that is all that the narrators have—their own words to explain something that has long since vanished—and that they are as lost and uncomprehending inside their words as the reader is. And maybe you are right. But I take from it the caution that the more complex your prose style, the more you need hard, bright words that stand for things that are not words if you don't want to baffle and intimidate your readers.

Recommended

[consilium-games]

New opportunities for consumerism!

At long, long last, I've published both Chamber+Circle and the pay-what-you-want supplement, Substitute Reagents! Go read up there, but to whet your appetite, Chamber+Circle is a standalone game in which you play as magical women with implausible weapons, fantastical vehicles, and a lot of ass to kick. Aeon Flux, Bayonetta, Witch Hunter Robin, Ultraviolet, and Underworld were big influences on the style, focus, and tone.

Substitute Reagents is a supplement with added rules and lots of detail on how to use them, together and singly. No real verbiage is put toward combining Substitute Reagents with Succession, or for that matter, Book of Sand. So, I'd like to get into that a little bit with this post.

First, What's Chamber+Circle (in five paragraphs or less)?

A GMful game with much the same framework and DNA as Succession, of no particular setting, in which one of the main foci is building the setting together as the group plays, while having action-packed, fanservice-laden scenes in which scary, competent women wield mystical power to defeat evil (or just anything they don't like).

The game doesn't come with Quests, like Succession does. Instead, it asks the group to answer questions together about the world at large, via 'Districts', 'Groups', 'Others', and 'Fixtures'. These serve much the same purpose as the 'Lots' page in Succession, but where 'Lots' is intended as a palette, and you have the assignment of painting a picture of the PCs' Adversaries (and scenery around them), the oracle page of Chamber+Circle is a bit more like a collection of concept clip-art. While a reader's (presupposed but likely) grounding with the trappings of Western fantasy will make things like "The Valley of Teeth" seem fairly straightforward to imagine, things like "so, the 'deuscientists' are a Group of some kind" will probably give less guidance.

This is intentional, and singled out right in the mechanics: where Succession gives each Adventurer two Skills, and gives everyone the means to Supplicate to their chosen God, Chamber+Circle gives every Witch the exact same Moves, across the board, lets them single out one as having a nifty side-effect, and gives a couple of narrative niceties (ie, non-mechanical, but asserted as facts of the game-world, making them relevant even if they don't directly reference dice and vice versa). And one of these Moves all Witches have is a pretty unique one: Remember or Cut is triggered by in-game events that differ for each Witch, and signal a kind of 'aside' scene, a flashback or jump-cut elsewhere, narrated by the player of the Witch who had Remember or Cut trigger. And almost the sole purpose and intent of Remember or Cut is to have a player take time to describe some of the setting, its history, and current events, outside of the Witches' immediate presence.

From the outset, Succession uses the Adventurers like mirrored balls, reflecting the world around them as much as affecting it. It uses Adventurers to explore the world. Chamber+Circle uses the world as a projector, to shine light on the Witches in all their glory. It uses its moments of worldbuilding mid-session to show how awesome are the Witches who bend that world over their collective and singular knees. This makes sense, as Succession took a lot of inspiration from Dark Souls, while Chamber+Circle took its cues from Bayonetta. (Maybe I should try to actually play one of them someday . . .)

And Book of Sand fits in how?

Short version: generic Western Tolkien-inspired fantasy isn't the only genre that Succession's engine can drive. Other genres work at least as well, depending on what one construes the genre to mean, and how one wants to explore and play in (or with) that genre.

Long version: Book of Sand is as much about teaching how to rulesmith as presenting prepackaged genre toolkits. It aims to pack a brief course on (very narrowly-applied) game design, into about a dozen pages, and give the reader something worthwhile even if they don't get anything out of the purported course. And I'll have more to say, probably in a future post, about the genres in Book of Sand and what you can do with them (spoilers: my next game is not really inspired by a video-game!)

So, Substitute Reagents?

Where Book of Sand gives you a kit of nice things just for Succession, and then some kits to turn Succession into something entirely else, Substitute Reagents gives you eighteen basically-isolated rules and subsystems, and guidance on what each can do. It's a bit like the difference between a gallery of model-kits (that so happen to have standardized fittings), and a gallery of tools with booklets on each for how to use them as tools. The nice thing about the former approach is that as long as you 'get' Succession, you get six very short RPG books, basically Batteries Included, No Assembly Required. The nice thing about the latter approach is, if you 'get' Chamber+Circle (for an even more forgiving definition of 'get'), you get a bundle of things you can use for most any game like Chamber+Circle (basically, any game using Ghost/Echo's framework, which Succession and Chamber+Circle both just give a more rigorous treatment of).

So what can you do with Substitute Reagents, say in light of Succession? Quite a lot, though as stated above, Substitute Reagents internally only refers to Chamber+Circle, with no real mention of Succession. Hence this post going into a little more meaty detail.

Firstly, Succession has some unavoidable gamespace overlap with games more to the tune of Dungeons and Dragons (though a lot more overlap with, say, Dungeon World). But, unlike either of those games, its combat minigame is . . . not a minigame at all. It's 2.5 Moves, and Misfortunes to juggle, and maybe Quests ticking toward Fates. No HP, or health-mechanics at all, no notion of range or cover or even numbers: on first principles, the rules don't know the difference between your desperate, wheezing, cowering tinkerer staring down an army, and your warcrying veteran leading a horde of vengeful berserkers on a felled and briefly-mortal necromancer. Succession, as a book, mostly aims to teach you and your friends how to make the rules care about the difference between those two scenarios, without feeling like you're puppeting the system, or fighting it, or having to ignore it and play Magical Tea Party.

Suppose you added one or more rules that distinctly, intentionally handle combat, as a discrete event? You have your choice of several, now! Each focuses on a different thing you get out of 'combat'. One deals with "combat as a good excuse to make everyone look really wicked cool", and does this by letting PCs work in close concert to curbstomp opposition, at the expense of quickly wagering their asses. Another deals with "combat as a genuine Undecided with repercussions everyone disclaims ownership on", and that system does it by stopping a moment to frame the stakes of the conflict or crisis, and having everyone involved (ie not necessarily every PC) have to roll for these stakes to finally settle the conflict. And a third focuses on "combat as an exercise in itself, the planning-out and execution of it being as important or moreso than the outcome", and this plays out with simple but usable rules for tactics, positions, ranges, weapons that play into these, and so on.

Or, suppose instead the main deficit you find in Succession (or games to be released later) is they don't acknowledge very well the idea of learned skills a particular PC would bring to the group. There's a 'blank skill' rule and guidance on how to put it to work. Now, you can take that 'Post-Apocalypse' genre kit from Book of Sand, and make it less drastic, with a 'Hacking' skill and attendant presumption that there exist things to hack, and benefits to reap by doing so. And more naturally, you can posit a 'Medicine' skill someone else has, that lets them patch others up perhaps with a risk of exhausting valuable supplies. It's a small, simple tweak, one a lot of readers of Succession will probably have intuitively come up with on their own, but now it's official and has guidance on how to do it.

Or, for a big shift in style, suppose you want a mechanical advancement system, and possibly concrete 'stat-like' numbers you can twiddle with? Substitute Reagents gives a simple, malleable menu of things a PC can 'level-up' into, and a choice of XP systems, so you can decide what should grant experience and improvement, since that will strongly incentivize some things and discourage or ignore others. And of course, in tandem with some specialties in Substitute Reagents such as 'Powers' or 'Implements', and a bit of modification, you can craft a good catalog of "things a PC can get via experience", and not just "how they would get any mechanical improvement at all".

How about Book of Sand?

No verbiage exists at all for applying Book of Sand toward Chamber+Circle, for a few reasons. One, economy of prose: in order to have the most utility-to-wordcount ratio, every word that doesn't contribute a useful rule or guidance is suspect. And, more pointedly, two, genre focus: while "gunwitches" isn't quite a genre, it's like a genre. It comes with some implicit statements about a world, and possibly something to say about our world; it expects certain allowances and interests from the audience that, if not met, will consistently send the audience to the door; it fits itself to enough of a mold of beats, arcs, and microdramas that the Ghost/Echo Move structure can pretty well encapsulate "gunwitches" the way it can encapsulate "Western sword-and-sorcery dark fantasy", which is significant for my purposes. So, welding real genres atop the quasi-genre of "gunwitches"--ie, Chamber+Circle--would dilute the focus of purpose.

But that doesn't begin to make it a bad idea. And you can even see some shades of this in certain rules in Substitute Reagents which slant more toward horror, or specifically-fantasy, or that help with supporting more sci-fi trappings. So let's look a bit at Book of Sand informing Chamber+Circle!

First, setting your Witches down in any setting will guide you a lot on that whole "build the world as you play" agenda. Having an acknowledged starting point and a single page for everyone to be on (or at least, a rough chapter) means that when someone chimes in about the deuscientists, it won't come out too jarring in juxtaposition with demons or ghosts--there's some cohesive, in-setting understanding of what those three things would or could be.

More pointedly, applying genre 'model kits' on top of Chamber+Circle will, largely, mean adding "things that make Witches different from each other". Chamber+Circle pointedly makes Witches differ mostly in "what happens when they do something cool", rather than "what cool things can Witches severally do?" But, most people will come at the game from a background that posits PCs as substantively distinct in mechanics, and while that's neither bad nor good, having to fight a habitual lens while playing isn't fun. Thus, the rule/s each genre has in Book of Sand that distinguish PCs will make Chamber+Circle feel more like other games--again, not bad or good, but possibly desirable for some, especially when still getting settled in.

Lastly, simply bolting one or two specific, well-chosen bits out of Book of Sand in, like "Chamber+Circle+New Gods" for example, or "somehow adding Milestones to Witches' lives", can turn your story in a radically different direction. Where you would ordinarily have "Aoi, Boumei, and Chie beat the literal tar out of a coven of crime-lord demons", now you have "Aoi, Boumei, and Chie are chosen priestesses of a quasi-pantheon of lost gods, and beat the literal tar out of a coven of crime-lord demons threatening to unmoor the gods from Creation". It's the same 'genre' of gunwitches, the same intended playstyle and themes, but one added bit of direction can change everything, and take a good but generic story to some really unique, personal places that perhaps only your group will ever see, if you don't share it with others.

In conclusion:

Turns out, using a mostly-uniform mechanical system, with very few moving parts, means you can hotswap a lot and keep things basically coherent! Next time, I'll probably discuss my next standalone game, and probably muse on what would make for a good supplement after it. It probably won't be "a supplement specific to the standalone game", unless unforeseeable fortunes prevail. It might though, as the Next Big Thing uses one very specific alteration to the core that Succession and Chamber+Circle hew to, and exploring what else you can do with this One Weird Rule might make for an interesting exercise.