#they had some VERY interesting thoughts about dulcinea last night

[zephyr-draws]

I love these stupid little lesbians

[jennamoran]

The Horizon Campaign (39)

Link to the Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine RPG, on DriveThru

Link to my storefront, on DriveThru

Let’s talk some more about the Horizon campaign(s)!

Previously,

We worked on our set of Main Characters and concepts, tied them to Arcs and colors and archetypes, built Rinley’s storyline, and got most of the way through their quests.

Then, we built quest 5,

Finished the quest set off,

And summarized what we had!

Before starting work on a new character: Sal.

And, flailing some more at his stories.

And, finally, getting them into somewhat acceptable shape.

Then we did a quick Sal quest before starting in on Entropy’s stories!

Then we updated those stories a bit!

Then we, basically, finished them up!

And started in on yet another new character: the Magical Detective.

And developed a bit more of a concept of who/what she was.

And started to pull in towards actual stories …

And hammered out most of the rest.

And put some rough synopses together for them!

And started work on Ogre-Sensei!

And struggled with her story and Estate!

And figured out the first book in her notional series!

And the second!

The third is going to be a little bit harder.

          Book 3

So after putting book 2 together, I went to bed and tried to sort out book 3. Let’s see if I can remember anything of what I thought!

Book 3 of Zoë’s story is going to cover Mystic quests 1-4. The important datum there is going to be quest 4, which features a hole in the world, or at least in the way that her life is put together. It’s partially psychological, but it’s symbolized by something very real.

Result. You manage to suppress it with the help of your family and friends. Or, if you’re completely cut off from all of those, by the intervention of a higher power or an unexpected friend.

...It’s probably not a permanent solution.

             The next thing we know about this, the next piece of the puzzle of figuring out what this story is, is that completing this book (in the default storyline) takes her to Primordial 3.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s how it’ll happen in game, so we can’t, like, rely on her having Primordial 2 powers during the story arc and we can’t rely on Primordial 3 powers coming in at the end to save her. But it does mean that when thinking about how the narrative works, it should be the kind of thing that ends up taking her to Primordial 3, even if a particular player winds up going to Indomitable 3 or whatever instead.

What does Primordial 3 let her do?

            Things Primordial 3 Lets Her Do

Primordial 3 will let her spread the waters under Horizon—and probably implicitly the plumbing—outwards from their current location in a series of branching tendrils that have a sense of touch. She’ll get to feel around with pipes or water.

She’ll get a permanent Health Level and associated magic limb transformation. I’d forgotten about that one last night, but it’s kind of interesting. That’s going to be something based on what other people think about death, and I think in particular how they think about their death, probably? So like if Leonardo basically knows that he’s going to die to his own science, to his own folly and hubris, even if he doesn’t say it like that—

Wait, this campaign set has Dulcinea, doesn’t it? Well, if Whichever de Montreal basically knows that, anyway—

Then, Zoë can probably manifest ...

     Hm

Well, maybe it’s usually not physical transformation. I mean, I’m not sure if I want to go in heavily that way for her yet?

So, maybe her high-end stuff just, like, wreathes her in the aura of that end, that fate? and she can channel radioactivity or lightning or whatever back in time from the future of that doom to now?

...

Honestly, figuring out how she transforms is a big deal, and I should get back to it as soon as I’ve gone over my thoughts from last night.

(Spoiler: I won’t. I get too distracted by the story itself. *^_^*;;)

For her transformations:

It’s traditional for ogres to do things like get third eyes and long fingernails and hair and maaaaybe beast or plant features ...

... but extra arms or machine parts representing the death of de Montreal seem kind of out there and manifesting them in response to a conversation seems like maybe stepping on Jasper Irinka’s toes a bit even if it’s just a generic Primordial power?

        But!

We’ll get back to that, along with, presumably, the implications of one such limb becoming permanent.

        More Primordial Powers

Finally, at Primordial 3, there’s the most important change, the big deal thing, the thing that is not always a big deal, that is not necessarily that huge a matter for every Principle, but is a serious thing with Death:

The ability to take some Death that is otherwise happening, you know, and bind it up into a token instead of an event or state. And then later release that token in a different context.

That is ... kind of a big deal.

I guess that technically means she can restore anything to life and then use the power gained from doing that to kill anything else?

I think of the thing she binds death up into as a hand mirror but maybe that’s not always the case.

          I Suppose

Technically it looks like this isn’t a Major power, so that’s probably where the limit of this is:

It’s not Major, so she can’t just, you know, sidle up to Jasper or Principal Entropy II and remove the death of Principal Entropy I, or, of Jade. It’s not Major, so she can’t take a bunch of death from somewhere else and use it to kill off all of Fortitude.

(Not that she’d want to! But the point is, without a quest miracle, she also basically can’t.)

Some dead people may have a permanent Affliction: Dead on them, in addition to being defeated, and that would mean that they’d die again pretty soon if she brought them back ... but honestly I don’t think that’s terribly common. Maybe if they’ve genuinely and completely moved on, in a way that the default dead person ... hasn’t?

It’s like, you’d expect a really parroty parrot to have Affliction: Parrot, but, not, like, Joe Random Parrot out there on the street.

Same thing for the dead, who are basically just parrots with possibly fewer wings and less feathers and possibly more miscellaneous other things who happen to have ceased their corporeal life. 

Or, like ...

If there’s, like, a dead D&D character with 10 racial levels of “dead,” for clarity not undead because that’s different, obviously, most un-things are not the same as the underlying things, what even is a derlying thing anyway? but just dead dead, and you cast resurrection, then maybe the dead D&D character doesn’t want to give up their 10 racial levels just because you’re waving around a sparkly gem. You know? That’s a lot of experience being dead to just toss away! They had to get through a lot of antisocial encounters!

But all that aside ...

Mostly, you know, she’ll be able to just ... take away death, and then use it later, and that’s a solemn ... and terrifying ... thing.

         What I Was Thinking

What I was thinking last night is that if that’s the endgame, if figuring out that she can remove death is the endgame, and the end of the final quest is patching a hole in her life with the help of her friends, then I could put together something where there’s a sweet happy ending with that, you know? Like, at the beginning, she’s overwhelmed, and thinks that everything is falling apart, and there’s no recovering anything. At the end, though, she’s saved something. She and her friends and family, anyway, they’ve saved something. They’ve pulled something back.

And I was formulating this, and going along pretty well with this, I think, until I remembered that I also needed to get her from Isolation 2 to level 3.

          So

So I turned on my computer, because I didn’t actually have Isolation 3 memorized, and practically blinded myself from the light from the screen, and looked up what would be going on there, and it wasn’t really very well aligned with where that line of plot thought had been going.

It was all, like:

“You’re becoming quieter, meeker, afraid to disturb the people around you.”

          Or, from the card perspective:

You’re surrounded by beautiful people. Beautiful things.

And then there’s you.

It’s stupid, isn’t it? To feel so insecure. But you’re just not cool. Not like them.

           So ...

That didn’t really fit with where things were going in my earlier idea; I had to figure out a plotline that ended with her winning, in a pretty meaningful sense—closing the metaphorical and literal hole in the world—but also feeling pretty done in.

And uh having the power to relocate Death.

I think that card is a very good picture of Isolation! It’s very suitable! But admittedly, it got in my way.

        Where to, From Here?

I wasn’t sure. If the book ended with her drifting away from people—

At some point, I realized that that could just mean, drifting away from the ogres, not necessarily also the PCs and the humans, or vice versa—

If the book ended with her drifting away from people, and at least notionally being lonely and in the dark, but also succeeding as she did ...

That meant ...

A very melancholy, emo victory, right?

A win, and a realization or conclusion that she’s a monster. And not in the usual sense in which she’d be proud of the term.

           To

To refine this a little, I thought back to the original source of the Mystic Arc structure, which was passion plays and devotionals. Put another way, I thought back to the idea that this is ultimately a story of her devotion to her Principle, Death, being tested.

Which is a little weird! I mean, Death isn’t like Hope, or like, I dunno, a religious person’s faith. For the most part it’s kind of natural for her to not be super devoted to Death, to waver when someone comes around trying to tempt her away from the true path of Death, to have her faith in Death falter when in the doldrums of quest 3, and it’s kind of weird that there’s a subtle underlying implication that an embrace of Death is what helps her rebuild connections with friends and family and get through the test of quest 4.

But that’s what we have here. In the third book, we start with her reeling from the whole thing with the tram-ogres, and end, basically, with her finding Death.

... and isolating herself, drifting away from the world, or maybe just the ogres.

... and solving some problem that existed at the beginning because she had turned a bit away from death?

                   At One Point

At one point I had this thought that the friends she found community with in quest 4 would be ghosts. That this would be the quest where she just, like, went all in in hanging out in the ghost world.

                       I Still Don’t Have a Story

... this far in, and I still don’t have a story.

Hopefully, though, we’re getting close!

We have Abandon and Time as possible opposite numbers for this storyline. Possibly we had Oppression floating around too?

Of them, I am more drawn to Time. ... but I guess I will look at each, in turn.

If her opposite number for this Arc is an ogress bound to the Walking Fields, and Time—or, I guess, possibly a Jotun? They feel more Walking Fields-y, and are conceptually ogre-like—

... I guess whether to do an ogre or Jotun here depends on whether we’re focusing on social ogre-society-based stuff or not?

        Focus!

If her opposite number is an ogress/Jotun bound to the Walking Fields, that ... seems to be, like, someone pushing her to grow beyond Horizon.

Or, I guess, someone who is all, like, the unbroken continuity of tradition is more important than individual lives and deaths?

Which is certainly, uh, a perspective.

           Miracles of Death

New tack!

Each of the remaining three stories will have to have a Mystic 1 quest-ending miracle of Death; what kinds of things can these be?

       Miracles of Death (cont.)

Looking at Mystic 1 quest ending miracles of Death, a couple options come to mind. One is some sort of flashback-based story connected to the death of Principal Entropy I. For symmetry with Rinley, though, and to space it out from the last dead tyrant story, I’d like to put that one book later, even if Zoë’s opinions on Principal Entropy I are complicated and not, uh, principally, negative.

Another possible Death-related miracle is discovering something in the ghost world that she’d thought lost forever.

And ...

I guess I will need a third, right?

Probably a wondrous haunting? Like, the kind of ghost and will-o-wisp and creature of the night parade that makes you think of haunted Horizon as an amazing place rather than a horrid one?

Or, hm, I probably do youkai parades too much, maybe something like a ghost palace or the ghost of a dead empire returning for a night or something like that?

       So

So one possible path of story is that she is discontent for a while, then she finds something she thought she’d lost forever in the ghost world. She wrestles philosophically with ... let’s say, a Walking Fields surrogate of some sort ... over whether ghost-haunted Horizon is correct.

... hm, that almost wants to be tied to the ghost palace version?

She loses whatever she found in the ghost world; end of Mystic 2.

Her life falls apart; there’s a hole in her world. This is presumably something about her distance from ogre culture, but there’s a real manifestation. One might say … an ogre lord of some sort, taking the reins of that society, fencing her out.

                  This

This suggests to me that probably this isn’t a storyline about the Walking Fields.

Instead, this is how we do Abandon:

There’s this Primordial of Abandon, this jackdaw prince, who is rising to prominence in the currently destabilized ogre society, and the reason his arguments about eating people are tempting are that he isn’t pitching “eat people” to her, he’s pitching “stay an ogre, stay one of us” while he’s increasingly gaining the power to define what that is.

Ultimately, though, defeating him, and casting him down, doesn’t lead to everything being OK. It fixes the hole in her life. She realizes that she’s an ogre still, or, she realizes that she still has a home in Horizon with the teachers and the students of School even if she’s not a proper ogre any more—but either way, she ends the storyline feeling an acute separation from the side of that she doesn’t identify with, at the end.

She defeats the King of Abandon, and ends up empty, tired, and alone.

          The Beginning and the End

How does the story, then, begin and end?

One option is that the ending is her kind of slumping: “It’s over.”

And a logical beginning to pair with that is her dealing with lively, rambunctious students and being kind of tired of that and feeling like her work, her day, her everything, “it was never over.”

Another option is that the story ends with her able to rejoin ogre society now, having removed the political obstacle—but she’s not sure she can because she is, well, Zoë Rosewood, and is unfairly blaming or maligning herself, unfairly castigating herself as unfit to that, and lifting others up as shining stars.

That one, I think, would start with betrayal by shining stars.

          Right?

Like, the book starts with “the stars were cruel and fickle things” and ends with “I was nothing beside the all of them; they shone like stars.”

Or something like that.

To emphasize that when she’s thinking that others are shining stars, and she the dross, we the readers already know, from the very beginning of the book, that that’s a screwed-up perspective—that we can remember, even if she’s forgotten, that the stars are not in fact actually better than her.

                  Secret Admission

I am skipping a step here, and that’s wrong of me, because part of the whole reason for this series is to show that when you wonder, “Where does Jenna Moran get her ideas?” the answer is “she trudges her way to them, occasionally having the chance to integrate a random sparkly thought that never begins anywhere near the center of what she’s trying to build; you could do as much, too, if you put in the practice and work!”

The reason I am skipping the step is that we had an early dinner last night, just as I was trying to finish this up and get it posted, and food coma turned my thoughts into incoherent spluttering. Eventually, as it drew close to midnight, I managed to scrabble down the meat of the last few bits of this construction, but I certainly couldn’t form coherent, expressive sentences.

I had to revise it for readability, to present it at all; and I guess, while doing that, I just kind of jumped right on into the thing with the stars and skipped past the fact that I did spend like half an hour thinking something like,

“If the ending is, she gets rid of the political obstacle that was in the way of rejoining ogre society, but isn’t sure she can because she is herself, then maybe the beginning of the story is, she’s trying to fit in?” first.

And that’s a very logical if dull connection to make and I had to stare at it for like half an hour, knowing it was wrong, inadequate, but not sure what was wrong with it, before I understood why it was wrong.

                  What Was the Problem, Exactly, for Clarity?

I think if I had to pinpoint it, it would be that when I write, “she isn’t sure she can because she is herself,” there is a strong implication in my head that she’s protesting too much, that she’s wrong; that she’s listening to despair, which lies.

... but none of that is actually written there, so I was having trouble extracting a good mirror-image of it out of the words.

Like, if I’d explicitly written “but she isn’t sure she can, because she’s listening to the voice of despair that says she’s not good enough,” then I could start the story with reflections on how despair lies.

Or if I’d written, “she can rejoin ogre society now, but she pulls back because she doesn’t understand how to be an ogre any longer,” then I could start the book with thoughts about how being an ogre doesn’t require you to understand how to be an ogre.

But instead I wrote down something where the main point was hidden in wink-wink, nudge-nudge, and then tried to build the flow of narrative from beginning to end, and I don’t actually know how to make a story that ends with wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

(... I guess maybe a meditation on the heartlessness of the reader who is watching her go through all of this? That would be kind of mean to the reader, though.)

          Anyway

So I found the stars thing, and there we are. In the end, she thinks about how others are shining stars and she’s just dross; in the beginning, shining stars reveal themselves to be even drossier, so that we know the ending is weird; and the cool thing about this is that “shining stars are nasty” is an evocative story seed for gaming, regardless of how it fits in the narrative.

It would be funny if it were, like, star spirits come down from Celestia to harass her because of her reputation and it’s completely unfair because most of her bad reputation is unearned. (Or if they’ve confused her for the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy because they’re both tied to Death, or whatever.) ... and maybe that’s the way to go? It does seem to be the kind of thing that would fit with her Yukari-sensei kind of life.

Like, their reasons don’t have to be wrong, per se, just,  based on stuff that we know extradiegetically to be false!

She is very suspicious!

Stars would have reason to be concerned!

    And then

The whole thing would end with a Death-based miracle, like ... maybe, they’re scared off by Horizon’s ghosts in some over-the-top flashy scene?

(I specifically imagined an annoying fairy type from central casting traipsing backwards while saying annoying things to Zoë before bumping into some or falling into the shadow of some ghostly horror, which then turns into an extravaganza of special effects.

... or something like that?)

          Last Night

Last night I’d concluded that it was probably best if the fickle stars at the beginning of the story were metaphorical stars, ogre luminaries, but now that I’ve slept and woken I am thinking that it is OK to make them literal.

And in the future, I will not quite make them stars at all ...

But we’ll find out about that matter! Tomorrow!

        Next Time

I just told you! We’ll find out about the not-quite-enemy-stars!